Sun and Oracle would do well to test and repair their updates as rigorously as we do! Last week, an update was released for Java, the technology on which QuickGene is based. That update contains a major flaw for Windows users, which prevents QuickGene (or any other Java program) from accessing certain essential information it has stored in the registry. This causes QuickGene 0.5 to crash while starting up.

Unfortunately, this update was released at nearly the same time as the QuickGene update, resulting in a number of computers containing the both the new Java version and QuickGene 0.5. Per chance, none of the four PCs in the office had the update, which caused the problem to go unnoticed until we updated our QuickGene installations at home and received reports from beta testers about mysterious crashes. Of course, we got to work on the problem immediately and, two hours later, we released a new update to version 0.5.1. This temporarily circumvented the problem, avoiding further crashes and allowing people to run QuickGene once again, despite the errors in Java.

Today, we have released an improved version which entirely avoids the current registry access problems currently present in Java. All Windows users should check for updates via the "Help" menu or download and install the latest version (currently 0.5.2) as soon as possible.