Why did Microsoft release SP3 for Office?

[Mike Valentine]

I have made the mistake of deploying Office 2003 SP3 and it has virtually
destroyed the Office installs on every computer in our company. It disabled
TIF file viewing which our company uses a lot. Even worse than that, it
messed up the combobox component in Access. I can only assume that the
entire world has become the beta testers for the company now. How can a
company with the amount of resources that Microsoft has get so many things
wrong? After this issue I am probably going to shutdown my WSUS server.
There is no use in patching products that make them worse after the patch.

 

[Vic]

Mike

Completly agree with you. No warning of possible conflicts issued. I use MS
fax and all files can't be viewed. It also stopped my microsoft imaging
working so I cant scan or view my liburary of documents. I have been in limbo
for a week now. Nothing I could find on the microsoft site its as if SP3 was
not issued.

Vic

 

[Mike Valentine]

Vic,

The problems with SP3 keep popping up. I found out this morning that people
cannot open Lotus 123 file anymore. It gives some bogus error about security
restrictions on Group Policy. Also, thanks to some really "wonderful"
programming you cannot uninstall this "update." You have to uninstall the
whole Office product and reinstall. I may not be the worlds best programmer
however, I know to test my product before I release it to the masses. (With
billions of dollars at its disposal you would think that you could get good
programmers.) Perhaps Google stole all of them??

 

[MikeBromley]

Mike, I too, agree with you. Our small office (17 users) has been completely
turned upside-down by office 2003 SP3. Especially by the Access combobox
error as I have written several key apps in Access and now they all fail. My
workaround was to restore all computers to a Restore Point previous to the
date of the SP3 install and then I turned off Windows Automatic Updates. MS
really screwed this one up!!

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

For what its worth, Microsoft did release some kb articles of known issues.
In regards to TIF/MDI documents, you would want to take a peek at:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938813

The instructions at the bottom to restore the file associations are not as
good as they can be. (Basically they don't show up in Windows XP GUI like
they say.) I found that all one had to do is restore these 2 key/values.


REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mdi]
"Content Type"="image/vnd.ms-modi"
@="MSPaper.Document"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.tif]
"Content Type"="image/tiff"
@="MSPaper.Document"


/neo

 

[Mosey]

Alas, I really have to agree! I'm only your average laptop bumpkin who just
wants to use Office and get on with it, but unfortunately have managed to
screw up my relative's Office 2002 by being overtly enthusiastic about
installing SP3, without fully appreciating the consequences.

I clicked to install from Windows update and let it run as usual. Relative
returns to open up key excel file, only to find an error message 1303 and
some permissions problem that I tried to resolve with no success after much
googling. Consequently, the error message went away, to be replaced with the
'waiting for installer' message (Frontpage professional etc.) which I've
read to be a result of a registry error.

Moving back to the excel file: It can't be opened if I cancel this process.
And the only way to open Excel is to use a Run command with some backslash a
to prevent add-ins from being opened too. Opening up Excel this way gives
the installer message again, but at least cancelling it means my relative
still gets a working Excel!

I still haven't found a way of going around this aside from reinstalling
Office (apparently the way forward?) but although the relative did receive a
bunch of CDs from the Dell supplier when she bought the laptop, they have
disappeared into thin air with the moving about (we're still looking) since
the laptop was bought 4 years ago.

To compound the existing problems, the SP3 update is still showing up in the
windows update box as needing to be installed!

At the moment, the new problem is that Outlook 2002 does not want to access
POP3 mail anymore. I've checked/rechecked account settings, disabled the
firewall, and even looked at ports (going very far for a newbie like me) and
whilst I have no problem retrieving the emails from my laptop, Outlook2002
on the relative's laptop still gives a 'cannot connect to POP3 server'
message.

I'm not sure what to do. But will continue looking... I've never had any
problems with windows updates (perhaps have been extremely lucky!) but am
really tearing my hair out with this one.

 

[Rocketman]

I must agree as well. I am a tech for a high-end investment company with 13
workstations. We use Brother Multifunction printer/scanner/fax to scan
documents directly into outlook. The printer interface program works fine,
until it tries to open a new message into which the scanned image is
deposited - then we get an error message stating "Cannot start Outlook. The
command line argument is not valid. Please verify the switch you are using."


This is just one of MANY problems I have read about in various forums - even
Microsoft has released a KB partaining to "known issues". And to make
matters worse, as someone has already realized, they will not allow us to
uninstall the SP3 without uninstalling the entire office suite and
reinstalling it. If this is going to be the only way we can get this issue
resolved, there is going to be a lot of time and money wasted on everybody's
part - MAJOR BLUNDER on Microsoft's end.

You guys pretty much hit the nail on the head - WHY??????

 

[Stewart]

Please explain how to restore the key values. Thanks.
--
WS

For what its worth, Microsoft did release some kb articles of known issues.
In regards to TIF/MDI documents, you would want to take a peek at:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938813

The instructions at the bottom to restore the file associations are not as
good as they can be. (Basically they don't show up in Windows XP GUI like
they say.) I found that all one had to do is restore these 2 key/values.


REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mdi]
"Content Type"="image/vnd.ms-modi"
@="MSPaper.Document"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.tif]
"Content Type"="image/tiff"
@="MSPaper.Document"


/neo

I have made the mistake of deploying Office 2003 SP3 and it has virtually
destroyed the Office installs on every computer in our company. It
disabled
TIF file viewing which our company uses a lot. Even worse than that, it
messed up the combobox component in Access. I can only assume that the
entire world has become the beta testers for the company now. How can a
company with the amount of resources that Microsoft has get so many things
wrong? After this issue I am probably going to shutdown my WSUS server.
There is no use in patching products that make them worse after the patch.