I posted earlier about the inability to open documents in the Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh.  The fix is here in the readme file (who has time to actually read readme's?)...in a nutshell the issue only affects users who have a consumer version of Symantec Anti-Virus installed (in my case I have Norton A/V 2003 installed, which was the last decent version IMO); you'll need to disable the Office Document Scanning Plug-in and all will be well.  At least the product team admits that they goofed up:

Office has an anti-virus API which we call every time we load a file. In 2007 Microsoft Office a change was made to support scanning encrypted macros. In making this change, we inadvertently changed the size of a data structure in the conversation, and Symantec's Norton scanner returns an error saying this was unexpected.

We treat ANY error from the scanner as a critical failure and block opening files. Unfortunately we do that in ALL cases where the scanner is called. In short with 2007 Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh and Norton Antivirus (any version) the user cannot open any files in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access and Project. The user receives an error of File failed to open, File not found, etc.

I'm not too worried about disabling this functionality, but hopefully this will be fixed by the time Office 2007 RTM's.

Share this post: | | | | |