Microsoft to reissue Office 2000 fix as SR-1a

According to internal Microsoft documents, the company will pull Office 2000 Service Release 1 (SR-1) from the market and re-release a fixed version called Office 2000 SR-1a. The company recommends that customers running Office 2000 on Windows 2000 systems that have been upgraded from Windows NT 4.0 not install SR-1 at all until the SR-1a update is released. Such systems have had Internet Explorer-related problems with searching and hyperlinking. And when you add this issue to the problems with SR-1 previously discussed in WinInfo, it's pretty clear that the Office team has done it again: SR-1 is simply of unacceptable quality for production environments.

The updated Service Release, SR-1a, will also be included in the new version of Microsoft Office that's due to ship next month. SR-1a, which will become available on the Web in approximately two weeks, fixes a number of problems that were introduced with the under-tested SR-1 release, such as a prompt asking users for "the SR-1 CD-ROM" (on an Internet-based install of SR-1). I've also identified a new problem based on reader feedback, that's been corroborated by Microsoft: Certain customers, such as press reviewers and book authors, received near-final Office 2000 code last year that are unable to upgrade to SR-1. When SR-1 is installed on systems with this pre-release code, Office applications start-up and then shut down almost immediately; behavior that Microsoft had reserved for people that had pirated Office 2000.

In addition to the predictable re-release of SR-1, Microsoft has also made available an Office 2000/Windows 2000 Registry Repair Utility to help customers that have upgraded from Windows NT to Windows 2000 and then applied the SR-1 patch. If you're one of those unlucky enough to be burned by this, please visit the Office Update Web site to get the utility