Issue while opening Office documents

From: Eric Piquette (EPiquette_at_ratiopharmNOSPAM.ca)
Date: 01/21/05 

Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:26:04 -0500

Hi,

I know this topic has been discussed a few times before, but I haven't been
able to find a permanent solution :

On our WSS sites, whenever we try to open Office documents (Office 2003
running under Windows 2000, browser : MSIE 6.0), the message
"Some files can harm your computer. If the file information looks suspicious
or you do not fully trust the source, do not open the file. You are opening
the following file : <filename>..."
comes up, with an "OK" and a "Cancel" button. We can then open files like
Word or Excel documents in read-only mode. We are looking to get files to
open R-O, but without any prompt.

I've seen references to the file "HtmlTransInfo.xml" under the web server
extensions directory. Editing the "OpenDocuments" methods (removing them in
the ProgID parameter) has indeed changed the mode as we then get prompted
with the standard file download dialog box instead. We then face two issues
: removing this new prompt, and the fact that the files are no longer opened
in read-only (no matter which software). Fiddling with the security settings
(setting them to the lowest possible level in all zones and enabling every
feature) hasn't worked either.

This is unfortunately not a viable solution for our intranet. I'm looking
for a way to possibly modify local user settings in order to circumvent
this. On my PC, also running Office 2003 & W2K, I only get the "Some files
can harm..." prompt with Excel documents. Word documents are always opened
in read-only without any prompts. I find this a bit peculiar as this is a
somewhat recent installation of Office and I haven't changed any web
settings in Word (or really any other settings than general display and
printing parameters)...yet I haven't been able to get this kind of behavior
on any other workstation in our organization.

Would there be a registry key referencing this, or other possible
modifications to the XML files on the host server ? Any thoughts /
references would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Eric P.