[ms office - 2010] Office 2010 Problems when off network

[jlucas]

Hi everyone

 

I've been trying to sort out the new staff laptops with Windows 7 and Office 2010. So far most things have gone in OK but I've now hit a stumbling block.

 

When a member of staff uses the laptop off the network (at home or somewhere in the school without network access) Word decides to play silly buggers.

 

It refuses to open any thing via the File > Open menu giving an Insufficient Memory error and asks if you want to save the current doc in a recoverable format. Saying No crashes Word.

 

If you try and open a file (say off a USB stick) Word gives and error about problems with the normal.dotm file and then crashes.

 

I'm a bit stuck as to what the cause of this is and its now holding up distributing the new laptops to staff so would like it sorted soon.

 

Has anyone got any ideas as to whats causing this or what I can do to sort it out?

 

Cheers

James

[vikpaw]

Not really sure.

 

A quick google search indicates things to check are is it the full version of Office, not just a beta or trial. Is it registered / activated or whatever it is you have to do with it. Did you install manually or via a network pushout / image? Have you installed Adobe 7 or another pdf type product that might have changed the default font.

 

Solved Office 2010 problem - Windows 7 Forums

 

Also, is the setup configured to look at the network for certain files e.g. the normal.dotm, maybe the default file save location, a custom font. Some of these things would be okay if you are on network and/or online.

[Phildw]

Did anyone ever find a fix for this? I have tried all the fixes I can find online - renaming/deleting normal.dotm, changing template etc locations, checking addons etc - and nothing seems to work fully. Been bashing my head against the wall for days over this!!

[vikpaw]

If none of the stuff i mentioned above worked, i'd go for a clean installation from CD whilst logged in as local admin to rule out any network issues.

Also worth testing as a local user - if the staff use them with cached network credentials that could cause a problem.

Experience with Win 7 over the years, has proved that you need to have quite high permissions to the local machine, especially certain areas for things to work, and not get blocked by UAC.

[Phildw]

If none of the stuff i mentioned above worked, i'd go for a clean installation from CD whilst logged in as local admin to rule out any network issues.

Also worth testing as a local user - if the staff use them with cached network credentials that could cause a problem.

Experience with Win 7 over the years, has proved that you need to have quite high permissions to the local machine, especially certain areas for things to work, and not get blocked by UAC.

 

Cheers Vik. Yeah I believe it is an issue with network users. I uninstalled 10 and reinstalled 2003 as we have this running on other machines without any problems, and I still got the same issue (well, got the 'Word has insufficient memory' msg). Then logged in as a local user and had no issues. However in the past I have never had issues with staff being unable to use Word (2003) when not logged onto the network.

 

I should note that we have recently installed a new server machine, running 2008. The old one was on 2003. Could there be soem issue in the way it has been set up that is causing this? Eg, atm we are running with redirected desktops which we didn't before, but not my documents etc.

[vikpaw]

I know we had issues with profiles. Especially when people used both win 7 and win xp. The profiles are stored differently, but some programs like Office weren't happy.

I'm not sure what is different on 2008, but we defo had to alter policies for home drive folders etc. as all the names have changed. Quite a lot of people ended up having to have clean new profiles.

It's odd it's affecting Word 2003, points towards it being a profile type problem. Are they local admins, that might help, at least for testing, and starting a new profile.

[plexer]

I have this issue with Win7 laptops and offline files although we get the file is read-only if you and try and access it or if you have a machine that doesn't have offline files enabled and try to read off a memory stick you get the read-only message.

 

I think it's likely to be a temporary files issue.

 

Ben

[Phildw]

I know we had issues with profiles. Especially when people used both win 7 and win xp. The profiles are stored differently, but some programs like Office weren't happy.

I'm not sure what is different on 2008, but we defo had to alter policies for home drive folders etc. as all the names have changed. Quite a lot of people ended up having to have clean new profiles.

It's odd it's affecting Word 2003, points towards it being a profile type problem. Are they local admins, that might help, at least for testing, and starting a new profile.

 

At the moment I have just set the staff up with local user logins to use at home for office. Their network logins are added as local admin on the laptop. This is working but is obviously not ideal. At the moment I have a lot of other things to sort out, so I will circle back to this in a few days and see if I can work out what the issue is. Unfortunately I am not very experienced in GPO and has only used Server 2003 a little in the past, and never 2008 previously. Cheers for the help so far tho!