1. First we are going to need to download Process Monitor.
2. Start up ProcMon and it will start showing you information. We are going to want to apply a filter.
3. We want to find out where it is attempting to find our ADS.ini file, so to do so we are going to use a filter on the log. The filter options should be:

So now the filter on the log will only display entries that have a file Path that Contains ADS.ini.

4. Add and apply the filter, and close the filter menu. ProcMon will now start monitoring all activities. To see where Advantage is looking for our ADS.ini we need to run the application that is receiving the 6420 error.
5. After recreating the error, the following entries appeared in ProcMon.

It appears that arc32.exe is looking for the ADS.ini file in the following directories:

• C:\Program Files\Advantage 10.10\ARC\ads.ini   (Application Directory)
• C:\Documents and Settings\XPMUser\ads.ini (Current user directory)
• C:\WINDOWS\system32\ads.ini
• C:\WINDOWS\system\ads.ini
• C:\WINDOWS\ads.ini
• C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\ads.ini

To resolve this, we can put our ADS.ini into the Windows directory or another directory listed above. After doing so, you may receive error 6097:

This means it did correctly read my ADS.ini. Now to resolve this error I would have to open up the ports Advantage is running on in any firewalls that exist between the client and server.

Summary

This example of using ProcMon to debug an Advantage error is similar for other errors. Often the error returned would specify the file its looking for, e.g. ‘ace32.dll’,’ axcws64.dll’, etc. All you would need to do is to change the path filter to the name of the file, and voila! You can now see where it is looking for the file, and easily put a copy into that directory to fix that error.