Microsoft Office97 problems.

[Peter Blake]

On Mon, 5 Jan 1998, Matthew Geier wrote:

> 
>  We have a problem with our site were Office97 applications (Word and Excel
> really) randomly crash with an Illegal operation in shell32.dll, usually
> when the user is trying to save their work. Often this results in the loss
> of that work.
>  We have been looking for causes for months and have been unable to isolate
> a cause. 
>  Some people have never had it happen, I for example cant make word crash on
> my system, but other people find it unusable. Disabling VET (Virus checking)
> for some people made the problem go away, but some systems work with VET
> resident checking on, and others still fail with VET not installed.
>  
>  We have roving profiles enabled, and one user reports the problem following
> her to another machine, a system which the usual user hasnt reported any
> problems of the Illegal Operation kind.

This happens to me - on machines not using samba at all, but on other
machines, I've never seen it. I think it's yet another M$ "feature",
possibly related to W95, because it doesn't happen when the same machines
are running NT4sp3 or NT5b.

It may also be related to roving profiles on W95.

> 
>  Im currently running Samba 1.9.18alpha13 on Solaris 2.5.1, with oplock
> support turned on. I was hoping that upgrading to oplock support might
> make a difference, but it has not.
> 
>  The PC's are all Win95B, Office 97 has SR1 installed, although we ran
> one with out the service pack installed, and it crashed the same way. Some
> machines have the ole update, the rpc update and the redirector update
> installed. This has made no difference.
> 
>  Most machines have PCI NE2000 clones, running full duplex to ethernet
> switches, but the type of NIC doesnt seem to be a factor, several compaq
> machines with intergraded AMD NIC's do the same thing.
>  The 10Mb FD workstations connect to Catalyst 3000 switches, which are 100MB FD
> connected to a Catalyst 5000, to which the Solaris server is connected to
> at 100MB FD.
>  The ethernet switches are not registering any congestion or errors.
> 
> 
>  Im running out of ideas and the natives are getting restless. Any one have
> any ideas ?, even ones we have to pay for ?.

Buy NT4 Workstation at the upgrade price and install SP3, or get Corel
WordPerfect 8 suite. NT has the big advantage of not being an M$ design
(Dave Cutler of VMS infamy did it), although there are now distinct signs
of M$ hacking in NT5.

>  If this keeps up they will hire an external consultant who will probably want
> to solve the problem with NT server. :-(

You can get WP for unix 8-)


---
Peter Blake
ppb at hft.co.uk
ppb at baloo.tcp.co.uk