Excel 2004 - File format no longer supported

[Mike]

Hey all, new to the group.

I have an interesting problem that is driving me quite crazy right now.
When my users are opening excel docs sent from windows users with
Macros, they are getting a "File Format No Longer Supported" error.
All users are logged in against Active Directory and have local homes.


When I log in as the local admin, I can open these files just fine. If
I delete the prefs from the user's directory
(~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft), excel attempts to recreate them and
the problem persists.

If I steal the local admins prefs folder and copy it into the user's
prefs folder, it seems to work all of a sudden.

The problem is obviously the preferences, but does anyone have any idea
why allowing excel to recreate the prefs itself actually fails? What
preference file is actually causing this failure? I'm running out of
ideas here, so any input would be great.

-Mike

 

[Mike]

Unfortunately, these are Active Directory mobile accounts, so you
cannot modify parental controls on them...I'm not sure why excel would
ever need to access to this anyway?

Regardless, it has to be something roughly related to the preferences,
because replacing them with the prefs from a local admin user fixes the
problem. The only issue is that this seems to be machine specific, so
I can't just generate "good" preferences on one machine and push them
out to the other 150 I'm using. Doing the process of logging in as
local admin, launching excel, grabbing prefs, moving them to the other
user's folder DOES fix the problem. In fact, the local admin never
has issues opening the files, only the Active Directory users.

I also tried with a non-admin local user, same problem. I then created
a new local admin, same problem. The only user that can open these
files are the initial admin account on the machine. Copying that users
preferences to any other user allows them to magically open the files
as well. To me it seems that Excel is not fully registering itself
when it isn't launched as the initial user on the machines. I'm still
trying to figure out why so I don't have such a tedious fix.