Problem with metafiles, graphics in D7 after crash

[Gary Mugford 12]

I asked this question in the ReportBuilder support forums but found out our subscription had run out three weeks ago and the Boss is out of the country so there's no renewing it until early next month. Doesn't help me right now so, I've come here to ask the same question. That said, it occurs to me that this is maybe not a ReportBuilder problem, but a different one of my own making. If there's any ideas beyond a uninstall/re-install, I'm all ears and eyes. Thanks for trying to help me out if you can.

 

My WIn7Pro x64 system that I use for program development crashed ten days ago and it turns out my daily backups are ... useless for Drive C. All 32 generations of them that populated one complete external drive. Every restore landed me right back in the Boot Manager without any hope of booting. So, after a week of trying to avoid it, my HW guy restored back to the last FULL DISK IMAGE of C/D/E (logical volumes on an SSD) from Oct 2018. I got back the D and E drives using my backups, where my Delphi versions 7 and XE7 are installed, but I had to re-install several components because of a lack of synch with the older C drive image. One of those was Report Builder 19.03. It APPEARED that the the install went correctly. No error messages. BUT ...

When I opened the BIG project, I got an immediate "Metafile is Not Valid" message. I closed it and hoped it would right itself when I recompiled it for the first time in a month. Turns out, no, it didn't go away in subsequent restarts. I went to a sub-form, made some changes in a Text Label and recompiled. This problem was that the I got an error. "System Error. Code 5. Access is denied" if runtime, "Raised Exception class EOSError with message 'System Error. Code: 5. Access is denied'. Process stopped" twice if in the IDE. I closed the blank preview and then clicked the print button a second time and it all worked, both in runtime and the IDE. Noisome, but the user understood the need to click through the error message, close the preview and then immediately print again to get the desired result. Still, not optimal.

Having a workaround, I now opened the SMALL SIDE PROJECT and survived loading without messages. I then went into the report designer (Report Builder) to work on a report and the JPEG graphic logo was considerably degraded. I tried replacing it with PNGs and even a BMP version. I also tried to resize the graphic in a graphic editor so that no stretching would be required. The pixel depth seemed to go crazy when I did that, taking a 3x1 graphic that I needed to fit into 1.55x0.5 and changed the pixel depth to EIGHT. I fooled around for awhile and got a fairly sharp 1.55x0.57 version PNG and plugged it in. Better, but not passable in a commercial setting. I looked at every report in the project. EVERY single one was degraded. Not all the graphics, just the logo that was stretched (and sometimes as is, in my experimentations).

Running generates no errors. The Preview and the PDF output differ, but that's nothing new. The text is readable and without problems, despite many accent marks. But that logo ...

Where do I go to fix this ... embroglio, that I find myself in? Am I facing a complete re-install of both versions? Is there some unit or test I can add that will lead me to the issue with graphic metafiles?

Thanks in advance for any offered help. GM