Rash of corrupted documents

[Peter Harrington]

We are using Word 2003 SP1 and Windoze XP Pro SP2. Several members of my
group have had corrupted documents recently on their own computers and
installations of Word, so this could be a bug in Word although the documents
are often shared among the several computers.

Fortunately, the Word repair document in the open menu seemed to fix the
problem. The interesting symptom is the corrupted documents increased to
approximately 10X the size of the uncorrupted documents. It is interesting
because this problem seems to be new. We don't use master documents and we
have fast saves turned off.

Any suggestions on how to report this bug will be appreciated. There are no
diagnostics when opening the document, just the statement that the document
'may' be corrupt. I have a copy of the corrupted document if any would like
to take a look at it.

Best wishes,

Pete

 

[RWN]

Not an expert, but;
They're not sharing Normal.Dot, are they?
i.e. each local machine should have it's own Normal.Dot.

 

[Peter Harrington]

Affirmative. The documents are transferred as outlook e-mail attachments
between machines.

They do include figures as enhance metafiles, and we are using EndNote 8 for
managing the bibliographies.

They are not shared across the netowrk.

Pete

 

[Graham Mayor]

It is not unknown for Word documents to become corrupted by e-mail. Zipping
the documents before transmission both reduces bandwidth and the opportunity
for corruption.

If the machines are networked, why are you transferring files by e-mail?

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Daiya Mitchell]

It's also not unknown for EndNote to be implicated in problems--how recently
did you switch to EndNote 8?

DM

 

[Peter Harrington]

If the machines are networked, why are you transferring files by e-mail?

Because Windows XP Pro does such a poor job with peer-2-peer networks. At a
university we can't afford the exorbidant costs of Windows Server Software.
In order to have a secure (i.e., non-simple file sharing) every user must
have an account on every computer which is not worth the administrative
overhead.

In addition, e-mail is a good way to maintain version control because the
drafts are stored in the Outlook mailbox folder OLK6 as a backup for each
user when they send a copy. Fortunately, disk space is relatively cheap.

Thanks,

Pete