A Happy Ending
Steve, you read me well, I was intrigued by the dual boot idea but before I could apply myself to it, I lost one of my external drives - a Maxtor - it just stopped working.
It was my "go to" drive for large files - which were usually AVI files - so I lost a lot of work. But taking it out of the system forced me to reinstall a few program, including VS11+.
I noticed the release of the new installation hotfix so -even though I haven't had the installation problems so many were experiencing, I thought I might as well give it a shot. So I installed that first and took and chance on also reinstalling MF6+ along with VS11+.
For whatever reasons unfathomable to me. Everything works wonderfully now. I wish I could offer something diagnostic and curative to end this thread.
It's worth noting that I didn't have the specific installation problems it was for but this hotfix seemed to have done something that took care of whatever was causing MF6+ to malfunction and ruin VS11+'s functionality, too.
All's well that ends well. I thank everyone for their advice and I wish everyone a happy holiday season.
Jeff
No Disc in the drive or disc is not readable
Could have been a hardware problem all along. I don't know what function call MF6+ makes to the system when inserting files but many persons including myself have had crashes with intermittent hardware failures. The problem is computers today run so fast we don't realize there is a problem. In past windows systems the operating system attempts to read disk sectors up to 6 times before reporting it cannot read the sector(s). So if the drive is failing and windows takes 3 to 5 times to get the data because of errors it doesn't report it to you. (Maybe it's in a log file somewhere's). I think windows still uses this process and counts on the Bios "SmartMonitor" to keep track of the drives integrity.
Reminds me of when I had a bad optical mouse. For some reason I could never search on my sata drive without getting windows errors or lockups. Always thought it was a problem with the drive or cabling connections. Other intermittent crashes in programs & casual lockups. Yet the mouse appeared to work correctly until one day it simply wouldn't respond with any accuracy.
After replacing that PS2 optical mouse with a usb mouse that system hasn't crashed since and I can easily search on the sata drive without any problems ( that was a few months ago and the system is still working well ).
Good luck, happy to hear you have made progress.
Reminds me of when I had a bad optical mouse. For some reason I could never search on my sata drive without getting windows errors or lockups. Always thought it was a problem with the drive or cabling connections. Other intermittent crashes in programs & casual lockups. Yet the mouse appeared to work correctly until one day it simply wouldn't respond with any accuracy.
After replacing that PS2 optical mouse with a usb mouse that system hasn't crashed since and I can easily search on the sata drive without any problems ( that was a few months ago and the system is still working well ).
Good luck, happy to hear you have made progress.