Microsoft Office XP

How we conducted our tests

One of the perks of being a member of Microsoft's MSDN developer network is gaining early access to the company's line of software tools. A few weeks before the May 31 retail release of Office XP (version 2002), the company shipped developers the final release of the retail code, and made it available to those with a password to the MSDN subscribers only section of the website.

After installing the program and using it for a while, we soon came across an unusual problem. This article details the situation, and what we had to do to fix it. We were running Windows Millennium Edition on an otherwise stable machine with 256MB of RAM.

In Figure 1, you see the dialog box Office XP pops up when it needs to access the program CD in order to install a feature that wasn't part of your default or custom installation. In this particular case, we were trying to read a Macintosh document created in Word 6.0 for the Mac. Notice the #% variable symbol instead of a drive letter in the "Use feature from:" area. This should not be there. We inserted the Office XP CD-ROM and typed "F:" into the white area of the dialog.

In Figure 2, it doesn't recognize the (original) Office XP CD in Drive F.

The Setup soon fails with an "Error 1706" dialog, as shown in Figure 3. The recommended SETUP.HLP Help file contained a great deal of information, all of which proved useless in solving our problem.

We checked the connections to the network and the CD-ROM drives as advised and tried again. This time, we moved the CD disc to our other CD-ROM drive (E:), thinking that Office XP might be confused by the presence of two drives. We used the Browse button seen in Figure 1 to navigate to the CD-ROM drive (E:) and selected the main Office XP directory, where a couple of MSI (Microsoft Installer) files are stored. We selected the one called PROPLUS.MSI.

As shown in Figure 4, the PROPLUS.MSI installation package file is apparently the one the installer is looking for, but it doesn't seem to like the copy on the original Office XP disc.

At this point, it was clear that something was seriously wrong with our Office XP installation. We exited out of the failed installation procedure and ran the main Setup program on the disc and used the "Repair" function in an attempt to repair the damage.

After the Setup program's repair function said it had completed successfully, we tried to load the file again. Same problem. It would get to a "Preparing to install..." dialog, then prompt for the disc shown in Figure 1, and then the Endless Loop From Hell would begin all over again. It must be a damaged CD, we thought. But the CD looked fine.

Only semi-daunted, we exited the procedure and ran the Setup program again, this time choosing to reinstall all components. That ought to do it,  we reasoned.

No such luck. Even after a completely fresh installation, the same problem occurred, ultimately resulting in the dialog shown in Figure 6.

While we were trying to decide whether the installation of a rarely used Macintosh file filter was worth additional hassle, we noticed something unusual about our "mostly working" installation. Now, the "New Office Document" icon in the Start Menu doesn't do anything. Okay, now we're worried. Clearly there are other, more serious problems.

Fortunately, as MSDN subscribers, we had access to a second copy of the program. We downloaded the code, burned it to a CD and tried again.

This time it worked, and we were able to install and read the Mac Word document without incident.

Figure 7 shows the Product Activation scheme that Microsoft uses to reduce piracy of the program. (Click to enlarge.)

Finally, everything worked.

otal time wasted: about two hours.

As detailed in part 1 of this report, some of the issues we encountered only showed up on a low-end machine. When we tested the final release of Office XP Professional with FrontPage on a Compaq Presario 1920 portable with 64 MB of RAM and a 300 MHz Pentium II processor, we encountered an odd problem in FrontPage. When attempting to double-click a link to select it, the slower processor seemed to reveal a behavior we hadn't encountered on faster systems. Instead of highlighting the double-clicked link, the system sometimes got stuck in a loop of flashing the insertion point, highlighting the link and then flashing the insertion point again. This behavior did not occur all the time, but became more apparent when other applications or background tasks were further slowing down the system or when a document larger than 32K was loaded.

However, low-memory misbehavior on a 500 MHz system running Windows Millennium with 256MB of RAM suggests the potential for more serious complaints. On two of our test systems, the above-noted "New Office Document" icon in the Start Menu worked if used immediately after a reboot, but wouldn't bring up a blank Word document reliably after a few other programs had been opened and closed. As noted earlier, reinstalling Office XP did not fix this problem. Only a reboot helped -- and even then, only for a short while. Oddly, invoking Word directly from the Programs submenu worked just fine at all times. Whatever the cause, it amounted to a minor annoyance and was not a major problem -- we  noticed that the Task Manager said "OSA (not responding)" and solved it by simply removing the Office Startup Assistant from the Startup folder and restarting. Both systems affected by this problem were running Windows Me.

Conclusion: While it is clear that not everyone will experience these issues, they does suggest that there are at least a few types of problems that can't be resolved by repairing or even reinstalling Office XP.

Although our experiences other than these incidents have been positive, and the program otherwise trouble-free (especially under Windows 2000), we suspect that a service pack will emerge before too long to address these and/or other bugs. It might be prudent to refrain from upgrading until the dust settles. For all we know, the "Error 1706" problems and "OSA not responding" errors might be common complaints.

Comments?

For Further Reading

• 05/31/01   Office XP Overview: Codename: Office 10 Updated