XPSP2 changes Word 2003 behaviour?

[Darrell Schroeder]

We have developed a COM addin for Office 2003. The addin creates a new
toolbar. The details of doing this seem to cause Word to update normal.dot
at every exit.

On some systems this does not cause a problem. On other systems Word
displays a message at every exit saying "The file Normal.dot already
exists." and prompts the user to overwrite or save to a new name.

We've been through the systems fairly carefully and they seem to be the
same at the level of Office. The version of Office that does not cause a
prompt is 11.5604.5703. One of the versions that does cause the prompt is
11.5604.5606.

The one difference that seems to be consistent is that the systems that
don't cause the prompt are Windows XP SP1, and the systems that do cause
the prompt are Windows XP SP2.

So the question is, would Windows XP SP2 cause a difference in the
behaviour of Office 2003?

And the second question is, is there any way to create a toobar in Word and
not have it saved in Normal.dot?

Darrell

 

[Darrell Schroeder]

We have developed a COM addin for Office 2003. The addin creates a
new toolbar. The details of doing this seem to cause Word to update
normal.dot at every exit.

On some systems this does not cause a problem. On other systems Word
displays a message at every exit saying "The file Normal.dot already
exists." and prompts the user to overwrite or save to a new name.

We've been through the systems fairly carefully and they seem to be
the same at the level of Office. The version of Office that does not
cause a prompt is 11.5604.5703. One of the versions that does cause
the prompt is 11.5604.5606.

The one difference that seems to be consistent is that the systems
that don't cause the prompt are Windows XP SP1, and the systems that
do cause the prompt are Windows XP SP2.

So the question is, would Windows XP SP2 cause a difference in the
behaviour of Office 2003?

And the second question is, is there any way to create a toobar in
Word and not have it saved in Normal.dot?

Darrell

Further to this: It appears that the issue is resolved if we apply
Office 2003 SP2. Apparently the issue occurs because our addin hooks
DocumentBeforeSave, changing the way Word handles saving the Normal
template. So the question becomes; Is there a patch in Office 2003 SP2
that addresses this behaviour, and what are the odds of us resolving the
issue without telling our clients they have to apply Office 2003 SP2?

Darrell

 

[Darrell Schroeder]

Just to wrap this up:

We found that having icons on the toolbar buttons and in the menu items
was causing Word to be unable to save the Normal.dot file. Apparently
this was fixed in SP2 (or possibly SP1) although I couldn't find any
documentation on it.

So now we don't use icons unless SP2 has been applied.

Darrell