[Ted Craven]

Yikes! That's a lot of contradictory reporting about the symptoms and solutions (and failed solutions). I'm going to have to spend at least a day sorting it out and talking to and connecting to different people's computers to observe what's working and under what scenarios, and what's not.

RDSS has had a connection to the tote board since the beginning, first BRISnet Supertote then TwinSpires tote. At first it was just tote data, then a year+ ago I added fetching quick Mutuel results, TS Ratings like ProfitLine and Prime Power, live Scratch info and available tracks today and MTP. I also added the means (in the Config file currently, but I will put that in the Config Screen) to disable fetching tote data but NOT automatic periodic scratch and track info (and fetching TS Ratings and Mutuels prices has always been a user-initiated process).

I added this disabling tote to versions AFTER the old one some people are still using V2.0.Beta-2.06. If people are suddenly having slowness issues, they can try disabling tote access, though NOT for this older version. Hence the suggestion to update to the current version. Some of the comments above do not state which version is involved but I do know that info for each RDSS user.

The confusing part for me is that, from the above reports (and other private ones), the advice to run the current version, disable tote and Windows SmartScreen - seems to help some and not others. It is possible some people think they are following the foregoing advice but are not really, which makes the debugging more confusing.

One thing - since automatically fetching periodic Scratch info (initially, then each 5 minutes afterwards) is not suppressed in the current version by the tote disabling instructions, if you turn tote off you may still get a spinning wheel (slowness) because RDSS is trying to fetch scratch info every 5 minutes and failing (for still unknown reasons).

The bottom line re most of these issues is that a) TwinSpires has changed some web links RDSS uses to fetch live data (and sometimes has subsequently changed them back again so they resume working, temporarily), b) Windows Security updates may be newly enforcing a setting which prevents RDSS from doing its job even if TwinSpires access is OK.

I will contact those who have reported to me or posted here to see if I can observe reported problems in action. I will try to give more advice on how to deal with the new problems with existing software.

I'll try to get an update as soon as I can, to either correct the data access problems or make it easier to work around them.

To those (few) who have written me saying they are fed up with RDSS and hate the customer service and have given up, I apologize for these issues, thank you for your previous support and wish you well.

Ted