I've had to use some rather strange workarounds to get things working, but none like these two. Today's post is an "interactive" one, so go ahead and post your own workaround stories in the comments.

Rusty B was having trouble connecting to a Sybase database through Access. He just kept receiving the following error message:

reserved error (-7748): there is no message for this error

Thankfully, Google led him to the solution in Sybase's Knowledge Base: 

To resolve this error, set WorkArounds2=8192 for your data source.

This can be done by using the registry editor (REGEDIT).

Craig Bowes' company uses Lotus Notes and noticed that a slew of documents have create/update fields with a date that occurs in the future. This ends up causing replication problems between servers and, since it's impossible to change these fields programmatically, they looked for some help from the vendor. It turns out that the issue is called Time Creep, and has some rather unique workarounds ... 

• We have had success migrating a server to a slower, less-powerful 
  machine to minimize time creep i.e. Dual Pentium 200mhz instead 
  of Quad Pentium 400mhz.

• Add debug code to the NOTES.INI to generate more log output 
  which will slow the server down. The more logging a server does, 
  the slower it runs.
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