Dear DSSATers,
Cheryl Porter and myself just resolved a problem that took a lot of time
and frustration. Hope this will save you some inconvenient.

The problem has to do with the MS Vista operating system and our popular
Compaq Visual Fortran. There seems to be issues of compatibility. Compaq
VF does not have support any longer and the recommendation is to migrate
to Intel Fortran. Intel Fortran is compatible w/ MS Visual Studio 2005.
Well, kind of. You first need to install at least a couple of Service
Packages, and then install Intel Fortran. No, you are not done yet. To
get the thing up and running properly, Intel recommends that you run
Visual Studio 2005 with Administrator privileges (right click the icon
and select Run as administrator). I thought that was it. Poor me. No,
that was not it.

In Compaq Fortran, local variables are saved by default. In Intel
Fortran, they are not. You initialize a local variable, leave the
routine, and when you return the variable has a different value, and
your program is producing garbage.

To fix this, in your Visual Studio menu go to Project and click on your
Project-name properties. On your left-hand side navigate to
Configuration Properties, Fortran, Data. Click on Local Variable
Storage, and select All variables SAVE. Apply, save and recompile the
whole thing.

Hope this may be helpful to someone around. 
Cheers,

Jon I. Lizaso
Agricultural & Biological Engineering
University of Florida
PO Box 110570
Gainesville, FL 32611-0570
(352) 392 1864 Ext 298