I have two phone lines, consisting of a dedicated fax line and a separate phone line (for normal voice phone calls). The fax line is connected to a computer, running WinFax Pro to receive faxes. Fax calls work perfectly, and the faxes are successfully received on the computer. However, when a voice call comes through the fax line (by mistake) this causes all sorts of the problems. It seems the computer does not know how to handle the voice call, and WinFax reports an error which prevents any other incoming faxes from being received. How can I fix WinFax so a mistaken voice call does not cause the entire system to fail? The computer is running Windows XP.

It seems that WinFax Pro is having difficulty realising that the incoming call is a voice call and does not understand the call. This is causing WinFax to error, most likely either keeping the phone line open/engaged (preventing any other incoming calls, since the phone is essentially “off the hook”) or is preventing the fax software from detecting incoming calls and accepting incoming faxes. Unfortunately, I have never used WinFax and given the old age of this software, I have been unable to find any useful resources which may provide information on how to resolve this specific problem. Therefore, my first suggestion would be to completely uninstall the program from your computer, and then attempt a clean reinstallation of the product. Hopefully this should resolve any corruptions or missing files which may be causing the problem. Should the problem continue after the reinstallation, ensure that you are running the latest version of WinFax Pro. You should be able to download the latest update for this software from the Symantec Support website (www.symantec.com/support).

If the problem still cannot be resolved after updating WinFax Pro to the latest version, or you are already running the latest version of this software, then we may need to seek the advice of other readers who have used this software. If you have used WinFax Pro and experienced the same or similar issues as Bill, then please write in with your suggestions on how this issue could be resolved.