technical solutions and commentary

There is a problem with a Windows patch (MS06-015) which among the symptoms are Office programs (Excel, Word, Etc) hang when opening files from the network. This is actually caused by the update conflicting with installed HP software. The problem is with the file Verclsid.exe. Renaming the ”c:\winnt\system32\verclsid.exe” fixes the issue. Microsoft also has published an article with the official Microsoft fix.

Microsoft KB 918165 - Problems in Windows Explorer or the Windows shell after you install security update MS06-015

It behaves just like the old Word macro virus where you could not perform a “Save As” and Excel and Word would hang when opening/saving a file using a network share. 

There is a problem with a Windows patch (MS06-015) which among the symptoms are Office programs (Excel, Word, Etc) hang when opening files from the network. This is actually caused by the update conflicting with installed HP software. The problem is with the file Verclsid.exe. Renaming the ”c:\winnt\system32\verclsid.exe” fixes the issue. Microsoft also has published an article with the official Microsoft fix. 

Microsoft KB 918165 - Problems in Windows Explorer or the Windows shell after you install security update MS06-015

 It behaves just like the old Word macro virus where you could not perform a “Save As” and Excel and Word would hang when opening/saving a file using a network share. 

Microsoft Excel may have a problem where you select one cell and then you can not unselect the cell or use the menu options. After you select a cell and move your mouse, all the cells you dra the pointer over become highlighted. It almost appears as though it has something to do with the sticky keys feature in windows.

I know of a couple of different instances where this navigation problem occured. Microsoft has some troubleshooting steps to resolve this behavior (KB307812), but all we have found to work is: 1. uninstalling the mouse driver. 2. rebooting the workstation and having it redetect and reinstall the mouse driver.

Add-in for Microsoft Office Project 2003 helps a user to quickly and easily create a PowerPoint presentation from a Project file. The tool extracts task information from the Project file and populates a PowerPoint template with the user-selected information. Get the Office 2003 Add-in: Project Report Presentation here.

I had the privledge of having someone demo the Office 12 suite for me. This product look great. Seeing the ribbon menus in action added to the experience, there are some other menus that automatically fade in depending upon what you are doing in the application such as highligting a block of text. The screen shots on WinSuperSite where great to see, but seeing this product in action definitely added to the the experience.

One of the more valuable things I saw as well was the graphics and charts that can automatically generated and modified my the user, and they look 1000 times better than the current built in fuctionality. Tey look like a professional graphics artist designed the graphics just for your doucument.

Excel ad some additional changes that finding all the available formulas much easier to find and apply. This will make finding a formula much faster than trying to use the help menu.

I was also shown the file changes, the .docx XML based format. Wow. You can actually open the office file you create in a zip archive program and view individually all the files that make up the Office file. For example if you embed a graphic into a Word doc a jpg image is actually contained in the archive .docx file. This means that if a piece of the Office file becomes corrupt, it doesn’t corrupt the entire file.

In the 15 minute demo, I saw quite a few things that definitely add business value.

This is an issue I ran into a couple of years ago. I suspect using Office 2000 Server Extensions (the predecessor to SharePoint Team Services) is rare, but may still happen. This took MS Support about 4 days, and about 6 hours on the phone to come up with a fix. So hopefully this will still help someone that runs into this or something like it.

Users get an error message when they try and access a page with dynamic content provided by the Office 2000 Server extensions on a Windows 2003 Server. This is because of the changes made in Windows 2003 to how IIS handles security by default.

“70:Permission denied This Virtual Directory cannot be accessed. This error can be caused if
Directory browsing has not been enabled for the directory, or if read Permissions have not been set. Please contact the Web server’s Administrator if the problem persists.”

The administrator can access the dynamic content without any problem

To resolve this:

Here is a utility for Microsoft Office XP/2003 to remove all of the mark-up and track chanes data from a file. While it is possible to do this through Office already (I remember seeing how to do this on Ask-Leo.com), it’s definately not obvious on how to strip the tracking data out and merge it into a final document. This tool really simplifies the process.

Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data

I use Outlook 2003 for several internet (POP3/SMTP) based email accounts. Outlook has a default account, which is wat is used to compose and send email. Ypu do have the option to choose an alternate account to use when composing new email. While this is supposed to work simply by choosing the account to use from a drop-down (Outlook even tells you that ‘this message will be sent by using the address…’), my Outlook client has continually used the default account to send email regardless of explicitly specifying what account to use. I have gone through and reconfigured the account settings several times without any luck.

While scanning my RSS feed subscriptions, I found a question about how to fix this exact problem. In summary, here is wat Leo said…

As it turns out Outlook will, under certain conditions, select a different outgoing email account if it has trouble sending on the designated account. Of course it does this silently.

My solution was to visit the configuration for the account I was having trouble with, and send a test email. It asked me for a password, which I knew it shouldn’t have. In my case, the sending authorization configuration for this account had been mistakenly changed to “Log on to incoming mail server before sending mail”. That’s not how my mail server is configured. Changing the configuration to “Use the same settings as my incoming mail server” resolved the issue.

By the way, of you don;t read Leos blog it’s a good resource, and a quick read.

Clear tje Outlook Name Cache (nickname list)
Microsoft Outlook creates a nickname list that is for name checking and auto completion. When you use Outlook it automatically creates the nickname list. The nickname list can become corrupted and when it does Outlook may not identify recipients, may suggest the wrong recipients with automatic completion or it might just send the message to the wrong person!

To clear the nickname list:

There will be a NK2 file for every Outlook profile on the computer. They are typically named profilename.NK2. Rename or delete this nickname file for the desired profile. When Outlook is opened again it will create a new nickname list.

When trying to send email to a personal Outlook Distribution Group in Outlook an error may popup that reads omehting like “Could not complete the operation. One or more parameter values are not valid. Internal support function returned an error.”

This may be resolved by creating a new Outlook Profile and deleting specific Outlook data files. Follow the steps in Microsoft KB 320842.

In the instance that the Contacts and Distribution Groups were imported into Outlook from AOL or another external source, creating a new Outlook profile and such will likely not fix the issue. This is due to the way Distribution Lists are stored by third part mail applications. In order to fix this the distribution lists in Outlook will need to be rercreated. However, using the imported contacts (selecting them when adding members to the groups) to create the new groups should work fine.