                   ANTHISTLE SYSTEMS & PROGRAMMING LTD.
                           563 Patricia Drive,
                            Oakville, Ontario,
                              CANADA L6K 1M4

                          Telephone 905-845-7959

                                                    13th. January, 2000


       PAYROLL CANADA REGISTERED USER RELEASE V4.51 13th. Jan. 2000
       ============================================================

	Traditionally I mail out the new program at end December or early
January.  This year being Y2K I thought it may be more prudent to wait
until mid January before mailing it.  To the best of my belief I knew
the previous version was fully Y2K compliant, but there has been so much
hype about Y2K I thought it might be worth waiting while some real
people had done some real pay cycles in 2000 to be absolutely certain.
No Y2K problems were reported, if they had have been it was my intention
to fix them for everybody in this release.

	Delaying release means that the new taxes were not implemented for
the first pay of 2000.  This will not have a big impact as: income tax 
changes are minor and are adjustable anyway when the employee files 
their annual tax return; CPP is being increased from 3.5% to 3.9%;  EI 
is being reduced from 2.55% to 2.4%. The net affect of CPP/EI changes is 
an increase in deductions of about $1 a week for a person earning $500 a 
week, and an increase in deductions of about $2.23 per week for a person 
earning $1,000 a week.  This version will adjust the CPP/EI underpayment 
retroactively and collect it in the first pay it processes.  The 
accumulated underpayment (say $4 to $10) should not be high enough to 
cause hardship for any employees when it is collected.


Minor program fix
-----------------

	The eagle eyes of Connie S. from Vancouver noticed that since the 
July update the cursor in the add or update employee data entry fields 
(such as hours entry) disappeared after paging up to the employee basic 
information screens 1 and 2. This had no impact on the entry of data, 
the field being entered remained highlighted and worked normally, but 
the small underline cursor under the actual character being changed was 
gone.  It took me a while to determine what was causing this but I 
finally found it.  The cause was a conflict between some new code and 
some old code in the employee comments screen where the cursor was 
changed on entry from an underline to a large block then because of the 
code conflict was not being properly restored to an underline on exit. 
This has now been fixed, the trade off being the comments screen now has 
a normal cursor instead of the previous large cursor. Just paging past 
the comments screen was enough to trigger the problem Connie reported, 
you did not need to actually enter or change a comment.


New Features
------------

	The two optional Windows programs, T4forms.exe and Wpaymenu.exe 
have been upgraded from 16 bit Windows 3.x programs to 32 bit Windows 
95/98/NT programs.  That involved a lot of reprogramming but no 
significant functional changes.  The new 32 bit programs will not run on 
Windows 3.x, but that version of Windows seems to be rapidly 
disappearing from desktops.  The installation program will not 
automatically install the 32 bit programs unless it finds DOS 7.0 or 
above (which indicates Windows 95 and up).  It will inform you if an 
older version of Windows is found, and you can optionally reply so as to 
force the 32 bit programs to be installed, but there is no need to do so 
unless you are certain you have a 32 bit version of Windows that was 
somehow not detected.  Forcing a 32 bit install on Windows 3.x will only 
overwrite your existing 16 bit programs with 32 bit programs that you 
cannot run.  If you still have Windows 3.x you can still use the 
equivalent Windows programs from the last 1999 release during 2000.

	It is unlikely that we will continue to support Windows 3.x in the
future as it is effectively obsolete and all the functionality of those 
programs still exists in the DOS programs anyway.

	For at least 10 years, maybe longer, we have included a data 
encryption option (SCRAMBLE.EXE on the distribution diskette) which I 
suspect is little used.  The intention was to provide greater security 
than a password for payroll computers that are accessible by others who 
are not authorized to see payroll information. SCRAMBLE always marked 
the files as encrypted by changing the last character of the extension 
to a graphic character.  This works fine in DOS mode, but when testing 
the new 32 bit programs I discovered that Windows 98 (and probably 95, 
and NT) are unable to properly recognize these modified file extensions.  
If you have been having problems using our encryption with Windows this 
is likely why.

	It has therefore been necessary to rewrite SCRAMBLE.EXE so that 
after encrypting a file it changes its extension to .ENC and adds a 
header record to the encrypted file which is checked before decryption 
to be certain this is one of our files (as opposed to some other file 
that happened to have a .ENC extension). The original file name,
extension, attribute, size, and date are also saved in that header as 
the file name may also need to be changed by SCRAMBLE (PAYROLL.DTA and 
PAYROLL.INX cannot for example both be called PAYROLL.ENC) and as the 
attribute of the .ENC file is marked "read only" to help prevent 
accidental changes.

	The new SCRAMBLE.EXE can still recognize and decrypt files 
encrypted by an older version, but because of the changes it is 
important that older versions of SCRAMBLE.EXE are no longer used.  If 
you are already using key diskettes containing SCRAMBLE.EXE then please 
ensure you copy the new version from the January 2000 distribution 
diskette to those existing key diskettes.  The 2000 versions of 
Paymenu.exe, Wpaymenu.exe and T4forms.exe will refuse to run 
SCRAMBLE.EXE if it has a file date prior to 2000, but earlier versions 
including the 1999 16 bit version of Wpaymenu.exe (if you still have 
Windows 3.x), have no such protection.

	The DOS install program has been modified so that it unpacks the 
.zip files onto a temporary directory then the results are verified 
before updating the program directory.  This is to prevent leaving a
possibly unusable combination of old and new programs, or partial 
programs, should there be a bad sector on the distribution disk.  If one 
of the .zip files fails to completely unpack then install will try to 
salvage what it safely can from what was unpacked and you will be 
advised whether or not the PAYCMAIN.EXE and PAYCMAIN.OVR files were 
replaced (because this is where 95% of what matters is located). The 
bottom line is that if part of the install fails you will always be left 
with something that is temporarily usable.  This part of the DOS install 
is also used by the Windows setup program so it applies to both.  If you 
do get a bad disk please either phone for a free replacement or if you 
have access to the World Wide Web (Internet) for a few weeks after the 
release date you can optionally download a replacement upgrade with your 
web browser by entering the following into the Address or URL line near 
the top of your browser window

http://www.rose.com/~chrisa/paycnupg.exe 
  (enter all in lower case)

The ~ before chrisa is the shifted character at the top left of the 
keyboard (between Esc and Tab).  Save file paycnupg.exe to a temporary
directory, end your web session if you wish, then run paycnupg.exe to
extract the files that were on the diskette, then from the same
temporary directory run the extracted setup.exe (if you have Windows) or
install.exe (if not).

If you have email but no web access send an email to
chrisa@user.rose.com requesting a replacement and paycnupg.exe will be
emailed back to you.

This will be faster than phoning us for a replacement diskette.


Windows Caveats
---------------

	Because the main payroll programs are still DOS please avoid using
long file names if creating new configuration or T4 files with the new
32 bit programs.  Long file names are not recognized by DOS except on a
computer that has a long file name file system.  If you transfer a long
file name file to an older computer it will probably be unrecognizable.
Safer to stay with the old DOS 8.3 format for now.

	For the last 15 years our payroll configuration files have had the
extension .CNF but now Microsoft have used .CNF as the extension of
their NetMeeting address files and entered it as such in your Windows
registry. This means our configuration files are identified as
"SpeedDial" in Windows Explorer and you cannot start Wpaymenu by
clicking on a .CNF file (because Windows will start NetMeeting instead).  
I could override this by changing the entry in your Windows registry and 
modifying Wpaymenu to respond accordingly, but those customers who also 
use MS NetMeeting may object if Wpaymenu starts when they click on one 
of their dialer files.  Since MS NetMeeting is supplied free with 
Windows I suppose ultimately I will have to defer to the might of 
Microsoft and change the extension on the payroll configuration files, 
but not this year.

                          Christopher Anthistle,
                                President,
                           13th. January, 2000
