Office 2000 Jan 8 2004

[Darryl]

There seems to have been a major problem with Office 2000
today, especially with Word and Excel. I run a computer
services company and received many calls today from
clients running the Office 2000 product. Both Word and
Excel were running very slowly and taking forever to open
documents. I also have Word and Excel 2000 and had the
same problem. When I changed the system date back a day
on my computer the problem went away. This causes me to
believe that there is a bug in this version of Office
triggered by todays date. The problem lasted from about
6:00am this morning (EST) until about 6:00pm this
evening. Now the programs seem to be working normally
again. This seems to have been a universal problem today
but there has been no mention of it on Microsoft's web
site. I hope that this was a one time problem and that it
doesn't occur again tomorrow.

 

[Sync]

If you take a peek at some other posts you can see what the problem is.
Hint: Almost every 10th question is about this.

Anyway, it's a problem related to Verisign certifictes and Norton Antivirus.

Here is a temp. fix. (no need to change the dates)
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2003081411062739

Sync

 

[Jeff ehrmann]

I have had this same problem today at my home and on my
office network. I am a sys admin of a windows 2000 domain
and I discovered that it was Norton causing the problem
during the scan it does opening Office documents. I also
noticed a problem with explorer.exe when trying to
copy/paste or cut and paste on files, even text files. It
slowed up when using the Right-Click menu on a document.

I found that the problem went away after uninstalling
Norton. Strangely enough, on my home computer, when my
wife logged on to my Windows 2K PC... she did not
experience the problem. This is strange. Anyway, just
figured I'd pass along the info.

 

[Beth Melton]

I recommend disabling the Office Plug-in option in Norton rather than
lowering the Internet Security settings.

Norton's Office Plug-in is notorious for problems. To list a few of
the many: causes Office apps to crash, prevents Office documents from
opening, prevents editing embedded object, and now slow opening of
documents.

Symantec claims you will still be protected by the AutoProtect layer
provided it is enabled.

--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/