Re: Word looks for another server on the network

Elliot Roper:

Thank you for your response on this thread:

in article 111220060959546401%nospam@xxxxxxxxx, Elliott Roper at
nospam@xxxxxxxxx wrote on 12/11/06 1:59 AM:

In article <C1A23088.1EB50%henryn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, henryn
<henryn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Elliot Roper:

Thanks for your response on this thread:

<long snip>
How any OS satisfies an application request for a file --or any other system
resource-- is entirely independent of the application. How an application
deals with the non-availability of the requested resource is entirely the
responsibility of the application. That's fundamental to the distinction
between "application" and "operating system". As far as I can determine,
the OS did exactly what it should -- it tried to get something requested by
Word. When the item was unavailable, the OS reported to the user what
happened and, reported the status back to Word, which blindly repeated the
request without offering any reasonable alternatives to the user.

It would be very useful, if this over comes up again, if you could post
details of how it happened. Getting solid evidence in front of the
maintainers is the most important part us users can play in getting it
fixed. We can't at this stage determine whether Word is being silly or
OS X is lying to it. I know where my money would be, but I *was* wrong
last time.

Yes, if I see this issue again, I will certainly post about it. I'm not
sure what I can do differently to document the issue. Screen shots of the
alerts instead of text quotes? I listed all the troubleshooting techniques
I applied -- no surprises, they're all well-known. I am certainly open to
learning new ways to document what I observe.

You can pass this message to "the maintainers": Please examine places where
the Word code attempts to get a resource from or through the OS, and check
for the possibility of an endless loop if "not available" or the equivalent
is returned. If such a loop is possible, please make sure that Word informs
the user about the identity --or at least the general nature-- of the item
sought and offers the user a choice to continue --in which case the user may
try to correct the problem on the spot-- or to exit Word in an orderly
fashion.


In your recent experience, the best we can say is that something out of
the ordinary happened when you transferred your work from one machine
to another. Since you are fairly confident that aliases were not
involved, I'd look again at your user ID's on your admin and work
accounts. Are they the same on both machines? (type "id") at the
terminal on each machine. My unix knowledge is small, so I don't know
how to change one of them if they differ, but I'm pretty sure that file
ownership rules are evaluated on the numeric ID and not the name.

Yes, the id's are the same.

Perhaps something broke, due to permissions, in the chain between some
file Word wanted (maybe some of your own work or settings, or maybe one
of the libraries it uses) and where the file really was? I'm out of my
depth here. It is just a wild guess. Did you do a fresh out of the box
installation of Office on your new machine, or did you use Apple's
migration assistant?

Let me speculate about your permissions theory: I can imagine a resource on
the new machine being unavailable because of a "bad" permissions setting,
and so Word sought that resource in the next best place -- the last place it
was successfully found. It still should be possible to find out what Word
was seeking.

About moving an installation, there's a very clear model describing where
application "state" is stored-- in the home directory basis of the current
user-- and it works very well. (There would be chaos if it didn't!) It
seems reasonable to have Office state stored both in both ~/Documents (The
MUD) and ~/Library/Preferences, and I'm quite capable of making sure these
are properly transferred, as proven by the seamless transfer of my complex
Entourage installation and data.

Thanks,

Henry


.

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