At 04:31 PM 30/4/98 -0500, Bruce Cutler wrote:
>To all
>A new problem appeared this week which is disconcerting.
>We have a Biorad MRC-1000 and use Confocal Assistant 3.10 to
>convert biorad .pic files to .tif files so that they can be used for
>image manipulation on other computers. In the past few days some of
>the converted .tif files will not open in Photoshop on  Macs (at
>least 5 different Macs have been tried). The error message is -
>"Could not open [file name] because an unexpected end-of-file was
>encountered. -39" Not all files that are in the batches have this
>problem, some do and some do not. Those that do not open on the Macs
.......

>Bruce Cutler
>Director, Microscopy Lab
>Univ. Kansas, Lawrence

Dear Bruce,
In a multiuser facility I use to run, some of the users would have a
similar problem, especially with large RGB 24bit images. It took ages to
work out what the problem was. Turned out it was quite simple. When saving
large files to disk it would take quite a long time and the user would
often close that image window down before the write to disk function had
completed, so that perhaps only about two thirds of the file would be
written to disk. CAS gives no error when an image window is shut down
prematurely whilst saving! Another complication is that the progress meter
is at the bottom of the monitor rather than the middle of the screen and is
often ignored. Two suggestions: Educate users to keep an eye on the
progress meter, and be patient. Change the colour of the "Active Title Bar"
to a brighter colour under the windows control panel settings. This will
alter the colour of the progress meter in CAS, so it is more distinctive.

It is easy for users to start off with 6 grey scale images, make a montage,
covert to RGB, resample the image (in photoshop) to say 300 dpi, so that it
prints out well. So they start with about 2.4 MByte of images and quickly
end up with 20 MByte or more. Without realising the increase in size of the
file. So they have no idea that all of a sudden it is going to take awhile
for the computer to handle the file eg. saving to disk.

This may not be the answer to your particular problem. However, I found it
solved ALL our intermittent CAS "faults". Also you should use CAS 4.02 it
is much better than the version you are using.

Bye,