Opening 97-2003 Office Docs in SharePoint with Office’07 Crashes I

funnybroad

Environment:
- Office Version: Office 2007 Professional Plus, installed via SMS (this
package does an Uninstall of the previous Office 2003 Professional Edition,
but leaves any other Office 2003 not included in that Edition on the
computer).
- Internet Explorer Version: 6 or 7 (it doesn’t matter which version)
- Document Libraries on SharePoint 2003 containing Office docs in both the
97-2003 binary formats and the new xml-based formats.
Behavior:
o The following causes IE to crash:
 Clicking on the name of an Office Document in the 97-2003 binary format to
open it (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc…) This is with or without “check-out” of the
document.
o The following does NOT cause IE to crash:
 Clicking on the name of an Office doc in the new 2007 xml-based format to
open it (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc…)
 Right-clicking on the name of an Office Document in the 97-2003 binary
format, then selecting ‘Save target as…’ to create a local copy.
 Check-in or Check-out of any office document in any format.
 Upload of any office document in any format.
 Editing the properties of the document item from the Document Library.

A common thread across the workstations on which this occurs is that they
still continue to run one or more of the following Office 2003 Apps:
FrontPage, OneNote, Visio or Project.

We found the following on various discussion groups, but neither has worked:
1) REMOVE Windows Sharepoint Services Support from Office 2007 by following
these steps:
• Add/Remove Programs /
• Office 2007 Professional Plus – click “Change”
• Add or Remove Features
• Change to “Not Available” on: Office Tools / Windows SharePoint Services
Support / Windows Sharepoint Services Support
However, after clicking “Continue” and waiting a long time for it to
re-configure, if you go right back and look at: Office Tools / Windows
SharePoint Services Support / Windows Sharepoint Services Support…… it’s
still “available”… it’s like the re-configure to make it unavailable fails.
We also tried to disable the same feature for each of the individual
remaining 2003 apps (FrontPage, OneNote, Visio or Project), and although it
appeared to be successfully disabled, the problem opening the files continued.

2) DELETE OWSSUPP.DLL and let Diagnostics fix it by following these steps:
• Go to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12”
• Delete “OWSSUPP.DLL”
• “Start” -> “All Programs” -> “Microsoft Office” -> “Microsoft Office
Tools” -> “Microsoft Office Diagnostics”
• Run the diagnostics to fix the missing OWSSUPP.DLL.
This process seemed successful, and reported that indeed 1 item had been
fixed (although there was nothing in the details indicating exactly what had
been fixed.) But the problem opening the files continued.

QUESTIONS:

1) What do we do to fix this on existing workstations?

2) What do we need to do to our installation procedure to avoid this for
future installations of Office 2007 Professional Plus?