I ran into a fun problem recently that ended up being related to conflicting versions of OFfice.
The symptom was that Internet Explorer (version 6.0; I didn’t test with 7) would intermittently crash when viewing WSS sites. There didn’t seem to be a reason behind what activity was being performed (e.g. viewing lists, web part pages, etc.), but it happened consistently in the same parts of the WSS applications.
After much hair-pulling, I found this newsgroup post, which turned out to have a solution that was right on target.
There appears to be an issue with client systems that are running Microsoft Office 2003 and then install some portion of Office 2007. In my case it was SharePoint Designer 2007 that was the culprit, but it could be any member of the Office 2007 family.
In any case, the solution was pretty much exactly what Sam in the thread mentions; I’ve reproduced it here for my own reference.
- Search on your computer for the mso.dll file. You should find one in the Office 11 folder and one in the Office 12 folder.
- Rename the mso.dll file in the Office 12 directory to mso.dll_old
- Go to Start > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs and find the Office 2007 product that you have installed.
- Highlight the product and select the "Change" button that becomes available. From the next screen that appears, choose "Repair" and hit OK. This might take longer than you expect – be patient.
- Reboot your machine
