Problems with Hiarcs 14 engines in Hiarcs Chess Explorer

[Amstaff]

I have been using HCE and the Hiarcs engines (DpHiarcs 14)without any problem for a few months. All of a sudden both Hiarcs engines won't load or run. I've worked with Mark a lot the last couple of days and he is trying to be very helpful. I have done the usual un-install, reinstall of everything to no avail. I have manually deleted the H14 engines from the HCE gui (in the preferences tab) and when I try to re-load them, I get an error message saying they are not uci engines! Ironically, several other uci engines I imported into HCE still work perfectly. Mark says he is 99.9% sure that something is running on my computer somewhere that is causing this problem. I am running Vista (yuk), AVG and some garden variety anti-malware program, that I've always had on the computer and there is nothing is any vaults there regarding hiarcs.
Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Gerald[/url]

[hgm]

Most reliable way to check if an executable is a UCI engine is to double-click it (which should open a command-prompt window), and then type 'uci' to it. It should then print its options, followed by 'uciok'.

[Amstaff]

Hello Mr. Muller, yes we did this and both engines checked out fine.
Still problems in the GUI though as I described.

[hgm]

That is indeed really weird. It suggests the problem is in the GUI, but the fact that you can run other UCI engines in that same GUI is evidence against that.

Have you tried running the HIARCS engine(s) in another GUI (e.g. WinBoard)? If that works, the engine should be in the clear.