Microsoft Word 2003 hangs when opening certain documents
That’s more or less what a customer told me.
This particular customer upgraded his old AS/400 Model 150 to a new System i5 520, and also purchased Small Business Server 2003, upgrading from 2000. He also got new PC’s, now running XP instead of 2000. All this happened a few months ago, and since then the customer had this particular problem - i didn’t really believe this till i saw it.
They were using OSP - a way to integrate our ERP software DIAS-iS with Microsoft Office (a revamped version for Office 2007 is currently in development). So, my first guess was that the problem was most likely related to our software, because it happened to a whole load of older documents, but not newly created ones.
So i logged in with the local administrator profile, which didn’t have OSP enabled. But the problem persisted. I tried two other machines, which showed the exactly same problem.
I had one last card to play, i installed the Microsoft Word Viewer 2003. A really nice way to rule out any and possible macro/extension related troubles. But again, the problem even happened with word viewer.
At that point, i didn’t really know what to do anymore. I opened the word document with Notepad, and looked through it, hoping if finding something suspicious. And there it was - \ \ S E R V E R 0 1 \ P A T H \ F I L E . J P G (with spaces and all, probably unicode). Server01 was the name of the old SBS 2000 machine.
Okay. The name was still available through WINS and DNS, but the machine didn’t exist anymore. I started Filemon, and unticked all the local drives and then opened one of the affected documents with Word, and got me a coffee. 10 minutes later, the document was open in Word. Word never really hung - it was just trying almost forever to open said files (What’s the reason that this isn’t async? That’s just stupid behavior!). Filemon verified my assumptions.
At that point, the solution was easy. I changed the WINS and DNS entries to point to the new machines, created an appropriate share, and even copied the images to the required places. Everything worked again.
In the end, i don’t really understand why Microsoft does such interesting processing with unavailable file locations. There should be at least a status bar / progress bar.
