Paperport 9 all of a sudden cannot OCR?

By Cathy Margolin, Reviews Editor

reviews@Netsurfernews.com      

Yes, I do have the newer version of Scansoft's Paperport 11 loaded on my Vista 64 bit computer, but I still like to use the Paperport 9 that  I have loaded on a workhorse Windows XP computer. All of the sudden it quit being able OCR a document-  to drag a scanned document into Word and read each character, so I can edit the document in Word.

The message I would get was:

 "System error incurred in external ink module EZText.g32. The OCR server is unable to process the document".  This was using Windows XP with SP3 installed.

I tried uninstalling the Word 2007, Word 2003 from Paperport and reinstalling. I uninstalled Paperport 9 and reinstalled it. All to no avail.

Turns out that Windows XP does not like the file format used (with the newer Service Packs), so the work-around, is to set Data Execution Prevention (click to go to Microsoft for a definition)  to allow an exception. DEP "performs additional checks on memory to prevent malicious code from running on a system".

To let Paperport 9 OCR work under this new tighter security, you need to add Paperport 9 as an exception.

Click on Control Panel, if in Classic View, select System, or  if in Category View, select Performance and Maintenance, then System.

Click on the Advanced tab, under Performance at the top, select Settings.

Select the Data Execution Prevention tab. Select the "Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select" button. Click Add. Browse to the C:\Program Files\Scansoft\Paperport directory and select the file PaprPort.exe, and hit Open. Hit the Apply button in the lower left to apply the changes. Hit Ok, then Ok. Then close the Control Panel. I would always suggest a re-boot to make certain the change takes before trying the OCR again.

I also found the same problem with ACDSee 8.0 and had to allow this also as a DEP exception.

Another problem solved!