On Thu, 2 Apr 2009 12:01:25 -0400, "Jay Freedman"
wrote:
In addition to Suzanne's pointers to the better KB articles, I'd like to
correct a misapprehension. You wrote
I find this action by Microsoft very unfriendly. I have been using
Word since it first came out. I don't think it's my responsibility to
load and resave all of my old documents every time a new release of
Word comes out.
That's not what's happening here. There is no need to resave the documents
even once, let alone "every time a new release of Word comes out." Microsoft
engineers determined that -- quoting
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938810 -- "the parsing code that Office 2003
uses to open and save the [old] file types is less secure". For reasons that
the article doesn't mention, they decided to disable that code rather than
rewrite it in a secure manner. They left it up to you to decide whether to
take the risk -- a very small risk if you open only your own documents, but
maybe a larger risk if you don't know where the old documents have been.
Perhaps there is no *requirement* to resave old documents, but if you
don't, you may not be able to open them without spending a couple of
hours chasing down obscure KB links and possibly corrupting the
registry.
I agree that the chase 'round the barn to find the right KB article is
pretty poor, but it is a one-time thing.
It's a one-time thing for *this* problem, but these problems come up
way too often. Each one is a one-time thing.
Without this group and the MVPs, the problem would be many times
worse. It's criminal that the MVPs aren't getting paid while Microsoft
racks up billions in profits. ;-)