There was a recent posting about why someone didn’t like Perforce. I’ll add another one:
The client sucks. Being the fool that I am upgraded my client to 2006.1. Big Mistake! Huge! It crashes all the time. Sometimes it will be stable for a day and other times it will crash non-stop for about 5-6 times in a row. On top of that I continually get winsock errors such as WSANOTINITIALISED and sometimes I get WSAEPROVIDERFAILEDINIT. For the life of me I have no idea how one could WSANOTINITIALISED in an application that is already running and connected unless they made some boneheaded coding errors (in a previous work life I worked at a Windows 3.x TCP/IP stack shop so I know a little bit about the protocol and winsock errors). I mean, the app is already working and I get a not initialized error? My guess is that someone called WSACleanup too many times. I’m also going to take a stab in the dark and say that these two errors (the crash and the winsock errors) are related.
I also have to agree with the other poster that for the life of me I can’t find an easy way to detect what files I’ve added that are not part of source control already. That has to be the lamest non-feature I’ve ever seen. How hard would it be too have a command-line option to tell me what files aren’t managed?
Supposedly 2006.2 will have offline support. It’s only going to be 2007 in a few months and they’re just now getting it? I’m already pushing my company to drop Perforce and go with Subversion. For one, it’s free, and two it doesn’t have a crappy client and lack of offline editing support. They keep making these kinds of mistakes and it won’t take me much longer to convert everyone.
Predictable Chaos 
I agree… I searched for this error message and your blog was one of two hits. Haha… Let me know if you actually figured out a fix.
I’ve never had any problems with the P4Win clients that you are describing and I’ve been using it for years. I would guess something is corrupt in your OS or the P4 installation. I think Perforce is an excellent source control management utility.
Well, it was probably a crappy build that shouldn’t have been released. It wasn’t just my OS because others in my group saw it too until we told everyone to hold off on upgrading. It still doesn’t change the fact that they were seriously late in getting offline support. Do they actually even have it yet?
Same issue here. Its not the client build per-se. I have coworkers with the same version of the client as me that have no issues. I believe its something with the OS, but have not had the time to test this theory.