Adding a note in case it can help other people out there who have DOF issues on just a few original and EM tables and who have been pulling their hair like me...
Despite applying fix mentioned above, I still had a few original tables and EM tables where my DOF contactors / toys would not work with VPx 10.8 yet would work when opened with old versions (10.7.3)
It's most certainly a consequence of upgrading everything to 64bit and registering directoutputcomobject from the directoutput_x64 folder on top of the x86, which you shouldn't do and which has really weird side effects.
My understanding is that depending on how the "controller" script of a table is written, VPX may be fetching dof settings from registry keys of old VPX versions and ignoring the software settings.
So, on top of fixing the link to the correct folder in regedit, I also looked for the DOF version number and found out I still had 2 versions around : 3.1.7698.40088 and 3.1.8440.34790 .
I replaced all the keys with the latter version number and now it all works again.
Yes some people may be using old versions of DOF (32 bit).
I've always installed the latest DOF R3++ from mjr's site. For some people who had problems (while also updating to 64 bit DOF)... installing that version fixed their 32 bit DOF issues.
I'm suspicious that I may have registered 64-bit, or have a registry problem, but I'm not sure, and not sure how to fix. Solenoids work on some of the Pinevent tables but not all. Solenoids work on most VPX tables, but not on some of the newer original tables (so Big Bang Bar works fine, but not Die Hard or Futurama), running the latest 10.8 64-bit beta. The trick is I'm never throwing the errors described above, so I never see those version numbers to hunt down in the registry. Not sure then how to see if I have the 64-bit registered.
I have reinstalled 32-bit Dof from MJR just to be sure I didn't have an old version running. Any ideas on things I should chase on this?