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Crashes in MS Office when Acrobat is present

May be due to conflict between Office, Acrobat (4 or 5) and Symantec Systemworks 2002

Abstracted from a post on Adobe's User-to-User forum where the user quoted a message he'd sent to Symantec:


Product: Norton AntiVirus 2002 8.x for Windows 2000/NT/Me/98/XP
...bug in Norton Antivirus 2002.
[Have Office 2000 and Acrobat 5 installed and] just upgraded from systemworks 2001 to 2002 and the following problems began:

Closing out of Excel (adobe's PDFmaker is loaded in as a plug-in), error message "Program error Excel.exe has generated errors and will be closed by windows. You will need to restart program. An error log is being created." [didn't happen prior to upgrading to Systemworks 2002]

There's more info about this in this article from Symantec's Knowledgebase

Deleting the "PDFmaker" plug-in from the C:\PF\microsoft office\office\xlstart stopped the message [but also disabled PDFMaker]

If I go into Norton antivirus//options//misc and disable the microsoft office option all my problems go away!

Symantec's reply, in part:


We have seen, in some situations, conflicts involving the Norton AntiVirus Plug-in for Microsoft Office.

If this happens, feel free to turn off that plug-in and let the Autoprotect be responsible for antivirus scanning. Your computer will still be protected by the Autoprotect layer.

Our developers are aware of the symptoms you are having, and they are working on resolutions. I don't have an e.t.a. for that.

How to disable Norton AntiVirus Plug-in for MS Office
(from a post by the eminent PowerPointer, Harry Hood, on the microsoft.public.powerpoint newsgroup):


Norton AntiVirus 2001

To enable the plug-in for Office 2000:

  1. Start NAV.
  2. Click Options, and then click General.
  3. In the Microsoft Office 2000 plug-in section, check Enable plug-in.
  4. Click OK, and then exit NAV.

To disable the plug-in for Office 2000:

  1. Start NAV.
  2. Click Options, and then click General.
  3. In the Microsoft Office 2000 plug-in section, uncheck Enable plug-in.
  4. Click OK, and then exit NAV.

Norton AntiVirus 2002

To enable the plug-in for Office 2000 or Office XP:

  1. Start NAV.
  2. Click Options, and then click Miscellaneous.
  3. In the How to keep Microsoft Office documents protected section, check Enable Office plug-in.
  4. Click OK, and then exit NAV.

To disable the plug-in for Office 2000 or Office XP:

  1. Start NAV.
  2. Click Options, and then click Miscellaneous.
  3. In the How to keep Microsoft Office documents protected section, uncheck Enable Office plug-in.
  4. Click OK, and then exit NAV.

To find this article, I went to the Search section of Symantec's website and typed in, "Office 2000" and "disable."


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