Office 2000 Service Packs

[Lem]

I have Office 2000 on my home XPproSP1 box. Although I've kept up with
all of the security patches, hotfixes, etc., for XP, I haven't done any
for Office. I visited the Office Update site and found that there are 2
major service packs plus a whole bunch of individual fixes.

Given that I don't use Office a whole lot at home (I have it for when I
need it to work on work-related stuff), I haven't noticed any problems.
My usual approach is to not patch unless something isn't working right
or if there's a documented security problem.

Any advice concerning which updates to install? Any updates to avoid? I
know some of the XP patches have been reported to cause problems
(fortunately, I seem to have escaped these) -- are there similar suspect
Office updates?

 

[Lem]

P.S. Looking more closely, I see that both SP are for "Office XP" and
both the service packs and the other updates say that they update "Word
2002" "Excel 2002" and so forth. As I noted in my original post, I have
the "2000" versions of these Office apps. "Office Update" scanned my
system and listed them as "required", but do any of them really apply to me?

 

[Sloan Crayton [MS]]

Lem, there are three service packs for Office 2000. You should consider
installing SP1 and SP3 (SP3 includes SP2 - so you can skip that step). In
addition to the large number of fixes provided by these service packs, the
recent security updates that were posted require that these service packs be
installed prior to the installation of the security updates.

If you don't install these updates, then you are vulnerable to viruses and
worms that take advantage of these flaws. SP3 also includes a security
update to Outlook that will block viruses being sent to you via email.
However, it will make some changes to the Outlook functionality that you
should know about prior to installation. See
http://office.microsoft.com/assista...ID=HA010550011033&CTT=6&Origin=EC010553071033
and http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=318515 for more details regarding
this change.