activate step not executing on certain Macs

This one has me stumped. I'm hoping someone has the answer, or even a
clue to point me in the right direction.

I have a script that retrieves the name of the currently selected box
in QuarkXPress and tries to find a matching record in a FileMaker
database by searching for that name string in a specified field.

It goes something like this (abbreviated for convenience):

tell application "QuarkXPress"
do some stuff to get the name of the current box
end tell

tell application "FileMaker Pro"
activate
do menu menu item "Show All Records" of menu "Records"
tell document "MyDatabase.fp5"
show me the record matching name of Quark box
end tell
end tell

The script is triggered from OSA menu in Quark. It works just fine on
my Mac running OS 9.2.1. I copy the script to my colleague's Mac--same
Mac model, OS version, AppleScript version, Quark, and FileMaker as
well.

The script fails at the activate FileMaker step. In other words, the
script does its thing in Quark and then the FileMaker icon starts
flashing in the application menu. Clicking on a FileMaker window (i.e.
activating FileMaker) allows the script to continue successfully.

What's going on? Why won't FileMaker activate like it's told to do? I
suspect some system component is missing on my colleague's Mac. But
what? Anyone?

Thanks
Andre

In article <367f15f0.0402171349.13361c3 RemoveThis @posting.google.com>,
boeya RemoveThis @orvis.com (Andre) wrote:

 > What's going on? Why won't FileMaker activate like it's told to do? I
 > suspect some system component is missing on my colleague's Mac. But
 > what? Anyone?

As a workaround, you can try to ask the Finder to bring FM to the front :

tell application "Finder"
set frontmost of process "FileMaker Pro" to true
end

Patrick
--
Patrick Stadelmann <Patrick.Stadelmann RemoveThis @unine.ch><!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->