IETAG.DLL (Smart Tags) with Office XP and Project 2003

[TC Machine]

I've got a computer that came with Microsoft Office XP installed from the
manufacturer. Later, I added Microsoft Project 2003. When my company does a
scan of the computer, the scanning software says that the ietag.dll file is
not the correct version. The version is the latest for Office XP
(10.0.6731.0) but the scan is expecting 11.0.8164.0. I read that if Office
2003 is installed, that the file is changed to the later version. But if
only Project 2003 is installed, is it supposed to replace the XP version with
the 2003 version. And if not, is there a security problem with having the
older version on the computer. Thanks.

 

[JulieS]

Hello TC Machine,

See:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922384

Although Project is called "Microsoft Office Project" I would doubt
that you have installed any purely office updates that would change
the file version to 11.xxxxxxxxx.

There are some references about installing an Office 2003 update.

I would not attempt to install any updates without checking this
further with your own internal IT staff and get their
recommendations.

I hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.

Julie
Project MVP

Visit http://project.mvps.org/ for the FAQs and additional
information about Microsoft Project

 

[TC Machine]

Hi JulieS,

One of the recommendations of the IT staff (who mandates running Retina) who
oversees our company's IT staff (of which I'm a part of) was to run an update
from 2005 for Project 2002, which upon reflection doesn't make sense to me
since I would expect any ietag.dll version in that update to be version 10
and not 11.

I guess I should probably be really asking the following question: Is
ietag.dll version 10.0.6731.0 considered an insecure version at the present
moment on a system that has Office XP and Project 2003 installed? Thanks.

 

[JulieS]

Hi TC Machine,

Sorry, I can't advise whether your system is secure or not. You
could certainly apply the security update for Office XP to address
the potential security threat. My concern is that the security
update would have a poor effect upon Project. I would not attempt
to run an update for Project 2002 if you are running Project 2003.

I guess I would ask why your IT staff is concerned that the
IETAG.dll file is not secure. If you were not running Project 2003,
it would start with 10.xxxxxxxx . You are running one product that
contains "2003" in its name -- you are not running the full 2003
Office Suite.

Julie

 

[TC Machine]

Well, I think that the installation of Project 2003 fakes enough of the
Office 2003 so that the Retina program thinks Office 2003 is installed -- and
thus it thinks the ietag.dll file should be at verison 11 instead of 10. On
test setups, I installed Office XP by itself and Project 2003 by itself
(which doesn't install any version of ietag.dll), and Retina doesn't
complain. It's just the combination of the two that creates the Retina
vulnerability". So that makes me think that the 10 version we have is okay,
security-wise since Retina doesn't complain about it when just Office XP is
installed.

Since I have the availability of Project 2007, I determined that I could
replace Project 2003 with 2007 and get rid of the "vulnerability" that way.

Thanks.

 

[JulieS]

Hi TC Machine,

Thanks for the update. I think going to Project 2007 is fine it has
some advantages over Project 2003 (most importantly multi-level
undo). However, there are also a few things that have been removed
from the 2007 release that others miss: saving as a web page (you
can save as XML in 2007 but you'll need to create a transform to
"pretty" it up); analyze timescaled data in Excel has been replaced
by Visual reports.

Julie