UNC Problems with Word

[Jonathan]

Here's a challenge

When we first started using MS Word we stored the company
templates on a mapped folder (drive X) on server 'Y'. In
the beginning Word used the UNC for specifying the
location of the templates. We could see this was going to
be a problem if we switced 'drive X' to another server,
so we implemented a registry key telling Word not to use
UNC. Fine.

Then server 'Y' fell off. Drive X is mapped to a
different server now. This works fine, all templates can
be accessed no problems. However, it appears that all
documents created before the UNC registry fix was applied
still go hunting for server 'Y'. This was tested by
sharing a folder with the same contents on an NT 4.0
workstation renamed to mimic server 'Y'. When this
workstation was online the old Word documents would open
quickly and correctly, however, take this workstation
offline and Word would take up to 5 minutes to open the
document.

So, my question is how can I fix this? Does anyone know
where in the Word Document the references to server 'Y'
are embedded?

My thoughts run to creating a Macro that copies the
contents of the document to a new file, deleting the old
file and naming the newly created file after the
original. It seems that copying the contents to a new
file erradicates the problem, doing this by hand would be
extremely time consuming however, there are literally
hundrededs of these files.

Any thoughts on this?

Your comments are much appreciated,

Jonathan

 

[Beth Melton]

Hi Jonathan,

What version of Word and operating system are you using?

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[Jonathan]

Hi Beth,

The problem originated in an NT 4.0 environment running
Word 97.

Word 97 is still widely in use across the network (a few
workstations are running Word 2002) and there are now XP
workstations as well.

Server side, server 'Y' was an NT 4.0 server and
it's "replacement" is currently running 2003.

Many thanks,

Jonathan