Office 2003 Proxy Authentication Problem

[Stefletch]

Hello,

 

If anyone could shed some light into this problem, it would be much appreciated. It's been driving me crazy for months.

 

It's a problem with Office 2003 running on Windows XP. When a user uses a office application to search for clipart on the web, the proxy authentication box appears behind the office app without the use realising. This gives the impression that the PC has crashed.

 

Symptoms occur on all tested mahines (Dell OptiPlex GX60 and GX52).

Sysmptoms DO NOT occur on Dell Optiplex GX620 (which is what is really annoying me!).

 

To reproduce:

1. Goto "Insert" Menu ---> Picture ---> Clipart

2. Do a search using a keywork ensuring that it is including web collections.

3. Proxy Authentication dialog box will apear.

 

Then either:

 

a) Click on the document area while Auth popup box is displayed. The popup will stay, but move your mouse over the top of the Dialog Box and it disapears.

 

or

 

b) Move the scroll wheel on the mouse when the popup box appears, then left click on the document area, the popup will disapear.

 

Effected Office Applications are Excel, Publisher, Powerpoint, and Infopath. Word is suseptable, however it behaves slightly differently in that you can click on the Word process on the taskbar, Word will minimize and the Authorisation dialog box will appear. Access does not have clipart functionality.

 

Upgrading the video driver to latest version (same as GX2017) for test machine GX5214, had no effect. Mouse drivers are the same on all machines.

 

Workaround:

 

Pressing ALT+TAB to scroll through open windows does work, however is not ideal as users will often not try this.

 

Office XP not affected by this problem.

 

IE7 Makes no difference to symptoms.

 

All Office updates / patches have been installed, ruling out suggestion at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/843607/en-us

 

 

Thanks to anyone who can help.

[ChrisH]

You need to make to make office.microsoft.com a proxy authentication exception.

[Stefletch]

I guess that's one approach but if you cant touch the proxy, I guess it's a bit harder.

[srochford]

What proxy server are you using? Do you normally get prompted for credentials when you go to a web page?

 

We use Office 2003 with ISA 2000 and ISA 2004 and don't get prompted - the servers are configured to use NTLM authentication and Office knows how to deal with this.

 

We do have other apps which don't work OK with ISA/NTLM so we've also got Squid proxies. This allows access without authentication so we configure the apps to use them as the proxy. This isn't always easy :-)

 

One command which helps is proxycfg - eg proxycfg -p squid2:3128 tells Windows to use the server called squid2 on port 3128 (cancel it with proxycfg -d)

 

If you can get another proxy set up then you could try using the proxycfg idea to see if Office will then go transparently.

 

If you want to log internet access then you need to make sure that users can't easily change to using the Squid proxy We disable the connections bit of IE; won't stop someone who can hack the registry but it makes life harder :-)

[webman]

Don't need to touch the proxy, just the IE settings for the computer. I think this is what ChrisH means: IE: Tools -> Inet Opts -> Connection -> LAN Settings. Advanced bit for the proxy, then add 'office.microsoft.com' in the "Do not use proxy for these addresses" (or similar) box. You should be able to do this via GPO for all machines.

[ITWombat]

@webman and srochford

The problem with proxy bypass is that Microsoft are not located in your subnet . Ofiice (or rather the IE engine) has to use whatever proxy that is normally used to ge on to the Internet.

 

I think proxycfg is only used to configure Automatic Updates and some other system level processes.

[webman]

The only situation I think putting an external site (not on your own subnet) in the proxy bypass list, would be if you didn't have a functioning default gateway configured for the client.

[ITWombat]

The only situation I think putting an external site (not on your own subnet) in the proxy bypass list, would be if you didn't have a functioning default gateway configured for the client.

 

Shouldn't that be the other way round? If the site's not on the same subnet and there's no gateway then bypassing the proxy would lead to a dead end.

 

I think some RBCs block direct connections to the Web (i.e. connection without using a proxy).

[webman]

Yeah, sorry :oops: I missed a few words out. You're right, if there's no default gateway on the subnet and you don't go through a proxy, you can't anywhere