First post!
One of the most common problems (it’s come through my inbox several times and you’ll see plenty of results if you Google for it) with SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office 2007 SharePoint sites is that opening an Office file crashes Internet Explorer, like so:
Closing the “we’re sorry” dialog gives you another error message:
This problem occurs when you have two versions of Microsoft Office installed on your computer. Here, for example, we use Microsoft Office 2003 for our standard Office applications, but many people use SharePoint Designer 2007 to customize their SharePoint sites. The issue is that the two versions of Office have a conflicting DLL, owssupp.dll. When you repair or update Office 2003, this DLL is overwritten with the older version, causing IE to attempt to do something it can’t with the older DLL and crash.
The official solution would be to download the hotfix from Microsoft. The link to download the hotfix, as well as the official description of the problem, can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938888
If, for some reason, you don’t want to install the hotfix, here are some alternative solutions:
- Stop using Internet Explorer and use Firefox or Opera instead. As an added benefit, you’ll get features you might not find in IE.
- On the other end of the spectrum, upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007 and make the bean counters at Microsoft happy. From what I hear, that ribbon feature is pretty nifty!
- “Repair” your Office 2007 installation (Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Microsoft Office [Office Application] 2007 > Change > Repair). Note that you’ll probably have to do this everytime you update Office 2003, so you’re probably better off installing the hotfix.