ESP: Known Bugs

ESP and its supporting programs are provided with no warranty and no support. These programs include full source code so they may be modified by any experienced programmer. However, if catastrophic bugs are uncovered, we will fix them as time permits.

Here is a list of known bugs in ESP 4.0.

ESP

If you use a question set in automatic mode, and a question "times out" before the participant can answer, you may see this error:
```
questionsetbox.c, Line 135: No questions in Question Set
```
The cause is known and will be fixed. There is no workaround at this time.
Some experimenters have reported that ESP sometimes does not beep participants enough, or not at the right times. This usually affects just a few Palms in the same experiment (i.e., most of the Palms in the experiment behave correctly). The cause is still unknown. Possibly some of the Palms are running out of memory.
When %TYPE is used inside a question set, the question might get sampled more than once. The following causes question 10 (How do you feel) to be sampled twice instead of once.
```
%QSET 1|10|How do you feel? %TYPE popup|happy|sad
20|%CHOOSE 1
```
Workaround: Avoid %TYPE in question sets as above and use the default widget. You can set the default widget in your experiment settings, though the setting is global.
You may occasionally see a reaction time of zero (0) in your data, but not see the "Non-Answer Value" in the response column. Reportedly this can happen if the participant accidently double-taps the Palm. You can ignore this data.

ESP Desktop

ESP Desktop's installer does not work on Windows Vista.
Don't use participant IDs larger than 65535. If you do, you may see the error message "Error 32: no participant data found", and no data will be downloadable from your Palms. 65535 is a theoretical limit. To be extra safe, keep your participant IDs to four digits or fewer.
If you have already run a critical experiment with participant IDs that are too large, and you cannot download your data, you can manually fix the problem on each individual Palm:
1. Use ESP Desktop do a hotsync. You will get the error 32 as before. However, in your hotsync log or your hotsync folder, you should see the ESP database that got backed up. Its name will look like "ESPR-###", where "###" is an integer. For example, ESPR-12307.
2. Take note of the integer on the end of "ESPR-###" (say, 12307). Also keep track of the original participant ID for your own records (say, 602105).
3. Disconnect the Palm from ESP Desktop.
4. On that Palm, run ESPPrefs. Change the subject ID to the integer you saw (e.g., 12307). Save. Now, the Palm should think the subject ID is 12307 instead of 602105, so it will match the database name.
5. Reconnect to ESP Desktop and try downloading the data again. It should work, though your subject ID will have changed to 12307. (But since you kept track of the original ID, 602105, you can relate the two IDs.)
Repeat for each Palm.
ESP Desktop does not install properly on some Windows machines. In these cases, hotsynching does not work. See our FAQ about hotsynching.

ESPPrefs

No known bugs.