SAMBA digest 1546

[Dave Fenwick]

>From: Matthew Geier <matthew at law.usyd.edu.au>
>Subject: Microsoft Office97 problems.
>
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>


I had a similar problem with one of my Windows 95B machines at one point.
My machine was crashing in the network redirector (vredir) and it was the
only box that was doing so.  It took me a while to isolate the problem, but
I did manage to find it.  The problem was with the latest Microsoft Windows
95 service pack.  The redirector provided in that update appeared to be a
bit buggy when combined with certain other drivers (which I could not
isolate - It seemed to be a combination of my network driver and my SCSI
driver).  I went out to the Microsoft SoftLib site and pulled the latest
updates for this.  After installing the update, I never had another problem.
The URL for the update is:

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/VRDRUPD.EXE

Give it a try on the offending machines.  See if it helps.

Dave Fenwick