excel in a service - office 2003 sp2

[al]

I was using Excel Automation via PIA in a Windows Service. Office 2003 sp2
broke it. I was just running it under the System account. I found I needed
to BOTH assign the Service to a User and make DCOM launch Excel as that
User. This was strange because just assigning to the service does make excel
run as the user with default config. I 'think' I needed to also make that
user a power user.

I also found that running the service as an admin worked but that was
unacceptible.

I'm going to assume this is new Office DCOM security in action.

If anyone gets any information regarding this service pack security rules
that is more concrete than my guessing, please post it.

al

 

[al]

Updating this post:

This solution, changing the Excel DCOM launch identity, caused 'cannot use
linking and embedding' errors to show up when I launch Excel as a user.

I have found that without the DCOM launch identity the automation process
will proceed after a long wait. If I give the service user admin priviliges
it runs fine.

al