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Office 2007 in Windows 2000


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5 hours ago, win32 said:

@Dylan Cruz

That happens to me too. Probably because it expects a different XP-style UI rendering routine, but can't confirm.

@win32Bad news... things were working fine... now all of a sudden, I get the dread "CRYPT32 incompatible error" again...

I haven't changed anything! It started with TCP/IP errors, nothing was connected, and when I logged into a new account, that's what I got.

Somewhere along the way, things broke... I think time took it's toll, and maybe Windows internally did something weird as it was doing its usual Windows stuff. Does your Outlook still work? What if you try to add a second account?

If I restore back to right when I did the restore, it works. But who knows where it went wrong. Somewhere, Outlook went willy nilly off the rails again. Once I restored, I could connect a Gmail and a Yandex account.

I've spent some time working in Outlook 2007 now and changing settings. Not yet to the actual sending/receiving part yet. Conversation view, like in 2003, is pretty much broken/nonexistent, as that didn't come until 2010.

Just out of curiosity, how hard would it to be to install Outlook 2010 *standalone* on W2K? I'm perfectly happy with the rest of the Office programs, and 2007 is a bit better than 2003, for sure, but I'd be interested to see if that would work/is even possible. Especially since XP supports both, so I'm not sure why KernelEx supports 2007 but not 2010.

Also, in Outlook 2007, does the Calibri font work for you? Mine looks more like 2003 than the 2010 interface in terms of font. This was on XP, so it looks all nice: 

 

Whereas on Windows 2000, Outlook 2007 just looks so much more ancient. Is this possibly because W2K doesn't have the "round font edges" setting?

**EDIT:** Fixed - go to Effects and click "Smooth edges of screen fonts". Everything looks *much* nicer now!

Edit 3 hours later: I've been using Outlook 2007 quite a bit now and it's been mostly working so far. Several crashes, but not enough that it's unusable. It's not really any less stable than Outlook 2010 on Windows XP, and that was an officially supported configuration by Microsoft, so I'd say the outcome has been quite good so far.

Edited by Dylan Cruz
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5 hours ago, win32 said:

@Dylan Cruz

That happens to me too. Probably because it expects a different XP-style UI rendering routine, but can't confirm.

@win32 OK, so it was too good to be true, perhaps, and sure enough, I've uncovered a few bugs that have got me stumped again:

It seems we only focused on half the puzzle. *Decryption* in Office is working. However, I'm unable to *edit* any encrypted files.

When I try editing/saving a Word doc that is encrypted, it whines that it can't save because maybe the disk is full or write protected. This is even when saving to the desktop!

In Excel, I get a different error: cannot access the file C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.MSO\3736C000.

Makes no sense to me what temp. Internet files have to do with this.

How do I know it's encrypted files only? So far, I've had no issues working with files that aren't encrypted.

So it seems we're closer than before, but encrypted files are basically read-only at this point, for reasons that don't make sense at all.

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@Dylan Cruz

The Outlook crypt32 error happens when it thinks it's running on anything else but XP.

And the encryption issue seems to do with user privileges, which are handled differently in XP. That is the same issue that is preventing us from installing Office 2010 and VMware Workstation 10!

The other way around would be to replace even more win2k native/BWC DLLs and run the risk of even greater breakage. I don't have that amount of time until I can get a few other commitments out of the way, which should take me a week. Because that does sound kinda fun! :)

Edited by win32
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11 hours ago, win32 said:

@Dylan Cruz

The Outlook crypt32 error happens when it thinks it's running on anything else but XP.

Gotcha. So NNN4NT5 is mandatory, but it's already enabled on my system.

Quote

And the encryption issue seems to do with user privileges, which are handled differently in XP. That is the same issue that is preventing us from installing Office 2010 and VMware Workstation 10!

Interesting. By that, do you mean Administrator/Standard/Restricted?

I found it interesting that W2K's "Restricted" is the equivalent of "Standard" in modern versions of Windows. Standard is not really around today, unless maybe that's power user or something.

Quote

The other way around would be to replace even more win2k native/BWC DLLs and run the risk of even greater breakage. I don't have that amount of time until I can get a few other commitments out of the way, which should take me a week. Because that does sound kinda fun! :)

Yeah, I think we're really on the frontier, now.

Don't get me wrong, Outlook 2007 on W2K is pretty nice, but Outlook 2010 would be really amazing.

Although, right now, my first priority is getting encrypted documents to work correctly. Are you able to edit and save them, or do you also get errors of various kinds?

Until then, Office is still only half-functional for me. How might I go about finding the problem?

Also, here's a consistent bug I've noticed in Outlook: I double-click an unread message and read it. I close it and then when I double-click a second unread message, Outlook immediately crashes. If I double-click a read message, it doesn't crash, and I can keep going. A bit weird. Unfortunately, they show up in Event Viewer but it's not really helpful:

ID: 6, Application Name: Microsoft Office Outlook, Application Version: 12.0.6607.1000, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.6612.1000. This session lasted 33 seconds with 0 seconds of active time.  This session ended with a crash. 

ID: 6, Application Name: Microsoft Office Outlook, Application Version: 12.0.6607.1000, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.6612.1000. This session lasted 1468 seconds with 540 seconds of active time.  This session ended with a crash. 

I get something like that every time it crashes.

Wait, there's actually useful crash information in the Application Log. Here we go:

Faulting application outlook.exe, version 12.0.6607.1000, stamp 4e398dcd, faulting module version.dll, version 5.0.2195.7019, stamp 41de2adb, debug? 0, fault address 0x0000261d. 

Faulting application outlook.exe, version 12.0.6607.1000, stamp 4e398dcd, faulting module version.dll, version 5.0.2195.7019, stamp 41de2adb, debug? 0, fault address 0x0000261d. 

Faulting application outlook.exe, version 12.0.6607.1000, stamp 4e398dcd, faulting module version.dll, version 5.0.2195.7019, stamp 41de2adb, debug? 0, fault address 0x0000261d. 

Faulting application outlook.exe, version 12.0.6607.1000, stamp 4e398dcd, faulting module version.dll, version 5.0.2195.7019, stamp 41de2adb, debug? 0, fault address 0x0000261d. 

That was 4 different errors, I guess it's the same error causing a crash every time. At least this helps narrow it down! The crashes are not random, but due to one specific cause as indicated by the errors.

Unfortunately, no useful information about the encryption errors, I just get:

ID: 0, Application Name: Microsoft Office Word, Application Version: 12.0.6612.1000, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.6612.1000. This session lasted 18 seconds with 0 seconds of active time.  This session ended normally. 

The encryption is a bigger problem, and there's nothing in Event Viewer to narrow it down. Ditto for the error I get in Excel when doing the same thing.

EDIT: The following also appeared, but I'm not sure from what: EventType offdiag12, P1 87967bb8-c803-4ab9-b47a-f5f36f6d49ca1e9bb9ec-e88d-48f3-b047-2f30cbdf06fa, P2 NIL, P3 NIL, P4 NIL, P5 NIL, P6 NIL, P7 NIL, P8 NIL, P9 NIL, P10 NIL. 

And now, something weird has happened where opening Outlook screws up the computer. Can't use it at all, I just get the five fingers mouse over, and if I open an Explorer window and drag it around, it copy cats itself all over the Outlook window each time I stop. If I kill Outlook, this goes away. This happens even after a reboot.

Honestly, I'm more annoyed with the encryption errors than with Outlook. I suppose I could use Outlook just for calendars, and use another mail client that natively supports W2K until it's working more smoothly (suggestions?) Does MailNews support Exchange?

@win32I wonder if the encryption errors are related to crypt32 or not. Unfortunately, I didn't think to try saving a document even when we had replaced crypt32. So I copied crypt33 to the desktop, renamed it crypt32, and then used replacer to replace the actual crypt32 with the crypt33 file. I know this will break Outlook, but I wanted to narrow down the encryption issues.

I rebooted and now in Word, I get the make sure the disk is not full error when trying to save. Excel gives the same error as before.

So, no dice. I guess regardless of whether Outlook works or not (which crypt32 is used), you can't edit encrypted files as it is.

Thoughts on a solution?

Also, as an update, I created a new word doc in 2007 and encrypted it there. Even that will not save. It doesn't matter if the encryption is the old or new kind, it just doesn't work.

Edited by Dylan Cruz
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@Dylan Cruz

As I said, it appears that the OS isn't properly providing write privileges to the encrypted Word file. Given that this program is intended for XP (and using XP's crypt32.dll), it's probably expecting a different routine.

But the version.dll in XP seems to be fully compatible with extended Windows 2000. Version number is 5.1.2600.5512, so the original SP3 version should suffice.

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8 hours ago, win32 said:

@Dylan Cruz

As I said, it appears that the OS isn't properly providing write privileges to the encrypted Word file. Given that this program is intended for XP (and using XP's crypt32.dll), it's probably expecting a different routine.

But the version.dll in XP seems to be fully compatible with extended Windows 2000. Version number is 5.1.2600.5512, so the original SP3 version should suffice.

I replaced the version.dll in system32 with the one from Windows XP SP3. Unfortunately, it still gives the same error. I get a Save As dialog first, but when trying to save I get the same message.

Edited by Dylan Cruz
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@Dylan Cruz

I wasn't being as specific as I should have. Has this changed anything in Outlook, since your Outlook crashes were due to a fault in the win2k DLL?

The user privilege issue is gonna be hard to tackle. I'm not sure how exactly this is implemented in the OS, but I'm looking at "acl" (Access Control Lists) DLLs and any others related to user accounts. Since only Office 2007 needs a workaround, they may only need to be implemented via DLL redirection by hex, but some of those DLLs are using a few imports that haven't been implemented in the extended kernel yet. Or maybe the links to ACLs are implemented in the crypto DLLs, and I'd need to analyze using something deeper than Dependency Walker (windbg, ollydbg, or maybe IDA Pro 5.0 free edition).

I'm quite surprised that I was even able to get reading of encrypted files working in the first place.

Edited by win32
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1 hour ago, win32 said:

@Dylan Cruz

I wasn't being as specific as I should have. Has this changed anything in Outlook, since your Outlook crashes were due to a fault in the win2k DLL?

Hard to say. I had to add a VBScript to Outlook manually expand all the IMAP root folders, since that's the only way to refresh the inbox counts (which is just dumb).

When I did that, folders expanded, and I got an infinite message in the lower right hand corner. I forget what it was, but I documented it on the Outlook setup guide.

That made Outlook unusable. Launching outlook.exe /safe prevented that, and I could use Outlook as before, but I could not remove the VBScript macro. Visual Basic editor just did not respond.

So I basically had to restore back at that point.

Also, there were several other reliability problems, namely crashing all the time,

I did decide to give MailNews a go. Actually, it's fairly decent, considering that it's not Outlook. It's much more stable than Outlook of course. There are things I prefer about Outlook and things I prefer about MailNews. It is very similar to the Thunderbird that I tried, although it's significantly leaner. The last time I used TB, it used so much memory, maybe 6 or 7 times as much as Outlook. Then again, that might have been because I connected all my accounts to it - but I also did that with Outlook. I only connected 4 accounts to MailNews to test it out, but it's decent. A lot of settings need to be changed, so I took the time to make a setup guide for MailNews on W2K as well.

Since neither Outlook 2007 nor MailNews supports Exchange in practice, there's less of a disadvantage to using MailNews than otherwise. I can import my calendar as an ICS in both that auto-refreshes anyways, and I need to import my contacts either way. In this case, although I much prefer the Outlook interface, even 2007, I might use MailNews as a main client because of its stability. I can't put up with all the Outlook crashes. Also, because the VBScript isn't quite working for me (or at least causes another Outlook issue), I can't get updated inbox counts with manually clicking on them all. With 9 accounts, I refuse to do that.

I do want it working though, as I could use it just for the calendar maybe. And as an alternative client.

Anyways, huge tangents, but good to know. MailNews is much better than TB, even though most of its annoyances are the same since it's basically the same thing. It does have the older feel too.

 

EDIT: I think the version.dll swap MAY have broken something. In all past restores, Outlook would start working again. I did do the version.dll swap, and I just set up an Outlook account, and it prompts for the password forever again.

So version.dll didn't fix anything with encryption, and it broke Outlook completely.

 

Quote

The user privilege issue is gonna be hard to tackle. I'm not sure how exactly this is implemented in the OS, but I'm looking at "acl" (Access Control Lists) DLLs and any others related to user accounts. Since only Office 2007 needs a workaround, they may only need to be implemented via DLL redirection by hex, but some of those DLLs are using a few imports that haven't been implemented in the extended kernel yet. Or maybe the links to ACLs are implemented in the crypto DLLs, and I'd need to analyze using something deeper than Dependency Walker (windbg, ollydbg, or maybe IDA Pro 5.0 free edition).

I'm quite surprised that I was even able to get reading of encrypted files working in the first place.

Well, hopefully that means it won't be too hard to shimmy W2K into doing more things it wasn't designed to do! I'm hopeful there's a fix.

I'd say this is really the last major issue left to be tackled. Outlook 2007 is working about as good as it will ever work, or could be expected to work (Outlook 2010 on XP, a support configuration, is more stable or useful, really, apart from a nicer interface).

So, as soon as I can edit and save encrypted Word and Excel documents, that means I can pretty much fully switch to W2K. There's nothing else I do on a daily basis that I can't do in W2K; last night, we didn't some testing, and I can even run emulators and VoIP softphones in W2K, which I didn't think would work!

Edited by Dylan Cruz
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@win32

Here's another something weird.

I installed Visual Basic 6.0 and that essentially bricked the machine. In addition to installing Java, it replaced a bunch of system files, including crypt32.dll, I noticed.

Now what happens it takes forever to startup, and then I can't log on, as it tells me the domain can't be logged onto or something like that. This was the bricked condition that happened in some of the early testing with patching files for Office/Outlook.

Considering VB6 is compatible with vanilla W2K, what is this all about??

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@Dylan Cruz

Just as I was reading your post, my machine BSOD'd due to an issue with the Kerio firewall driver. I can't switch to XP because it has an odd issue on this laptop where it will freeze when the boot screen is fading in 90% of the time. So I think I may have to switch to Server 2003, unless it has the same startup problem. UI-wise it's much closer to 2000 than XP while having more APIs than XP.

But VB6 is from 1998. Did win9x/NT4 even have crypt32.dll? I thought DLL hell was mostly a 9x issue, and such files shouldn't be replaced in a win2k install due to winsxs. Maybe you should have set NNN4NT5 to 2000 for that installation, but I don't think that should have made much of a difference.

Edited by win32
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3 hours ago, win32 said:

@Dylan Cruz

Just as I was reading your post, my machine BSOD'd due to an issue with the Kerio firewall driver. I can't switch to XP because it has an odd issue on this laptop where it will freeze when the boot screen is fading in 90% of the time. So I think I may have to switch to Server 2003, unless it has the same startup problem. UI-wise it's much closer to 2000 than XP while having more APIs than XP.

BSOD on your W2K? Oh, no!

Are you planning to fix it!

Server 2003 seems about the same as XP with themes disabled and the Windows inExperience patcher 0.72

Do you have any restore points?

In general, I avoid antivirus and firewall products on 2000. My rule of thumb is don't do anything stupid and I won't have any issues, and that's worked out so far. A hardware based firewall might make sense in the future but I don't have one yet.

3 hours ago, win32 said:

But VB6 is from 1998. Did win9x/NT4 even have crypt32.dll? I thought DLL hell was mostly a 9x issue, and such files shouldn't be replaced in a win2k install due to winsxs. Maybe you should have set NNN4NT5 to 2000 for that installation, but I don't think that should have made much of a difference.

VB6 even runs on Win 9x, and should on 2K (it's officially supported). The installer modified the file, though.

It should run on XP, but what would the difference in file modifications be on 2000 vs XP?

Hope your computer feels better!

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9 hours ago, Dylan Cruz said:

BSOD on your W2K? Oh, no!

Are you planning to fix it!

Server 2003 seems about the same as XP with themes disabled and the Windows inExperience patcher 0.72

Do you have any restore points?

In general, I avoid antivirus and firewall products on 2000. My rule of thumb is don't do anything stupid and I won't have any issues, and that's worked out so far. A hardware based firewall might make sense in the future but I don't have one yet.

VB6 even runs on Win 9x, and should on 2K (it's officially supported). The installer modified the file, though.

It should run on XP, but what would the difference in file modifications be on 2000 vs XP?

Hope your computer feels better!

I am going to reinstall win2k on this laptop tonight or tomorrow. Kerio isn't as unstable on other machines, and I get plenty of "unknown hard error" dialogs too, so I think that some of the drivers (especially the ATI driver) are also causing problems on win2k. I think I'll install extended core + XP video driver and see if it stabilizes things.

The thing about not using a firewall on NT5 is that it has a reputation of getting infected with worms like blaster within seconds of being connected directly to the Internet. There's a built-in IPSEC-based solution but it can be a little difficult to set up.

I'm gonna try VB6 before I format. If prompts come up during the installer to replace files, please put "no".

After further review of the setup files, I see crypt32.lib, but no crypt32.dll. If you can get into safe mode or have another method of viewing the OS partition, can you tell if there are any files in system32 dated 1997 or 1998?

UPDATE on Office: I looked at a successful save of an encrypted word document on XP and found that it was all advapi32.dll calling rsaenh.dll, while on win2k it goes straight to the error dialog. Maybe rsaenh.dll needs the regsvr32 treatment, but it could be far deeper. And changing advapi32.dll to the XP version would probably be a disaster.

Edited by win32
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14 hours ago, win32 said:

I am going to reinstall win2k on this laptop tonight or tomorrow. Kerio isn't as unstable on other machines, and I get plenty of "unknown hard error" dialogs too, so I think that some of the drivers (especially the ATI driver) are also causing problems on win2k. I think I'll install extended core + XP video driver and see if it stabilizes things.

The thing about not using a firewall on NT5 is that it has a reputation of getting infected with worms like blaster within seconds of being connected directly to the Internet. There's a built-in IPSEC-based solution but it can be a little difficult to set up.

How does that work? I've been surfing the web in IE6 and New Moon 28 now for a couple days and I've had no issues. Same as before when I was using 2000 vanilla and XP as W2K2. I actually installed MSE on XP, and then later uninstalled and is it didn't even work and just slowed things down.

How do you get infected by worms if you don't do anything sketchy? As long as I visit only "known good" websites, it's basically impossible to get a worm, right? I'm sure I could if I did something dumb or tried to, but obviously I'm not.

Or am I completely wrong here?

14 hours ago, win32 said:

I'm gonna try VB6 before I format. If prompts come up during the installer to replace files, please put "no".

I did replace files and it bricked the whole install upon reboot. I don't think no is an option. It doesn't let you proceed otherwise.

14 hours ago, win32 said:

After further review of the setup files, I see crypt32.lib, but no crypt32.dll. If you can get into safe mode or have another method of viewing the OS partition, can you tell if there are any files in system32 dated 1997 or 1998?

That's already gone, I already restored the test machine back.

In the meantime, I set up my actual machine for use. Connected all my mail accounts to MailNews, set up New Moon, etc. I did not install VB6 since that is known not working at the moment.

I did recently find that VirtualBox lets you view all the files on the system without even firing up the system. If it bricks your test VM, too, that should be an easy to check it out. I don't know if it gives dates, though.

14 hours ago, win32 said:

UPDATE on Office: I looked at a successful save of an encrypted word document on XP and found that it was all advapi32.dll calling rsaenh.dll, while on win2k it goes straight to the error dialog. Maybe rsaenh.dll needs the regsvr32 treatment, but it could be far deeper. And changing advapi32.dll to the XP version would probably be a disaster.

Interesting. So are we basically screwed or is there any hope? Could we not have advapi33 and hex edit to refer to that?

Since we replaced rsaenh, I don't see how that could be the issue.

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5 hours ago, Dylan Cruz said:

How does that work? I've been surfing the web in IE6 and New Moon 28 now for a couple days and I've had no issues. Same as before when I was using 2000 vanilla and XP as W2K2. I actually installed MSE on XP, and then later uninstalled and is it didn't even work and just slowed things down.

How do you get infected by worms if you don't do anything sketchy? As long as I visit only "known good" websites, it's basically impossible to get a worm, right? I'm sure I could if I did something dumb or tried to, but obviously I'm not.

I did recently find that VirtualBox lets you view all the files on the system without even firing up the system. If it bricks your test VM, too, that should be an easy to check it out. I don't know if it gives dates, though.

Interesting. So are we basically screwed or is there any hope? Could we not have advapi33 and hex edit to refer to that?

Since we replaced rsaenh, I don't see how that could be the issue.

Back in the day, port scanners would be running all over the place looking for unfirewalled machines to infect. Spam dialogs through the "Messenger" service were also quite common. Even with the decreased popularity of NT5 nowadays, I've had random Saudi IPs try to connect to port 445 (SMB) when on my school network. I haven't had issues at home, probably due to the NAT routers present there.

If VB lets you view the files through Windows Explorer, much like VMware's "mount HDD as network drive", then the answer would be obvious.

I think we could have advapi33, but there are some missing dependencies in win2k. There are pointers to it in mso.dll, all Office executables, and rsaenh.dll.

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