What Alan said. When TYPE XL5 was introduced, it was added because Excel 5 changed the output file format to some COM-based structured storage, iirc. So, VFP is calling some Windows OS-based API calls to create the storage, as it should, and that API gracefully fails ("0x80030003") when you are trying to write to a non-existent directory.
So, VFP is no longer calling the Windows API calls it would with CSV, WKS, XLS or the other formats to create a single file handle and return it to VFP to write to, so it doesn't get the "Invalid path" error return. It's calling a COM function that ought to return a structure pointing to the streams to fill, etc. and doesn't handle the return as well . (Start here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/Stg/structured-storage-star... if you'd like to delve into the horrors of this.)
If Windows drops this core COM support, it's likely not going to be Windows any more, so I wouldn't be sweating this particular feature going away. It would be a good bet that VFP would also not run any more, which is a feature we always have to be planning on... eventually.
On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 9:53 AM Alan Bourke alanpbourke@fastmail.fm wrote:
I would imagine the functionality is baked into the VFP runtimes, I've never had an issue with it failing on any version of Windows, even without Excel installed.
-- Alan Bourke alanpbourke (at) fastmail (dot) fm
[excessive quoting removed by server]