Office 2004: Accessing a network share causes Word, Excel and Powerpoint to crash

[Richard Wraith]

Just wondering if any other early adopters have come across this bug in
Office 2004 for the Mac. So far I have experienced this with Word, Excel
and Powerpoint.

If you have a network drive mounted that is the same name as the home
directory on your local Mac (i.e. your username in both locations e.g.
juser on the local Mac and JUSER as the server share name) then Office
applications will crash if they try and access the network drive under
some circumstances.

The circumstances appear to include:

* If the default file location is set in Excel to any directory inside the
network share Excel will crash when Open is selected from the File menu
(or command-O). The error message is "Microsoft Excel has encountered a
problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."
Powerpoint also exhibits the same behavior.

* Word will crash sometimes when doing an update save on a file you are
working on that is located in a directory in the network share. Word will
crash with an error that the file name is invalid. Excel and Powerpoint
also also crash during file operations in a similar way.

Word also refuses to set the default file location any deeper than the
network share name.

This is a new bug. Office X for the Mac was able to handle home
directories and network shares with the same name without any trouble.

It appears that the move from Office X to Office 2004 applications have
lost their ability to distinguish between locations.

I can imagine this could be a widespread issue as the default home
directory name on OS X is the username and it is common for network shares
to be mounted as a users username.

My setup: 12" Powerbook, Panther 10.3.4.
Server: Samba 2.2.3a and Debian GNU/Linux.

 

[MD]

Hi Richard,

If you are using File Vault on your account, try turning it off and it should
start working for you. Not that this is an acceptable solution. I'd suggest
logging a bug with M$ except they probably won't care, or will just blame
Apple...

regards,

 

[Richard Wraith]

An update to my 28 June post.

After much experimenting and testing I have worked out that FileVault
(directory encryption) and MS Office do not play nicely together. Who
knows who is at fault. I am sure Apple and MS will blame each other.

In any case once I removed FileVault protection from my local home
directory on the Mac and the symptoms described in my earlier post went
away.

Cheers,

Richard

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

Despite MD's queasiness toward Microsoft, you'll find them very interested
in solving problems of this sort.

It's important to know the proper way to submit a bug report. Use the
Feedback feature from the application's Help menu. Bug reports submitted
via this method are tracked in a database and prioritized based on the
severity of the bug, number of reports, etc.

The newsgroup is a great way to share information concerning bugs as they
are discovered, such as this one. It is especially helpful that a possible
cause has been identified. So it is a great thing that this newsgroup
exists.

Now please take that moment to submit the bug formally using the feedback
method. Bugs noted here in the newsgroups are not necessarily tracked by
anyone from Microsoft. This is just a forum open for discussion.

Thanks.

-Jim
--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi again,

Today the Macintosh MVPs were given information that employees of
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit will be reading the postings in the Mac
newsgroups looking for bug reports and other problems.

We were told that it is important to note that only the Mac newsgroups will
be monitored, so that we don't want give the impression that all of the
newsgroups will be read.

The MacBU is "going an extra mile" for us.

-Jim
--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info


-Jim