A new Office 2003 bug that stops you opening documents.
There’s a new Office 2003 bug but it doesn’t affect most users and almost certainly not home or small business customers.
If you have Microsoft’s Rights Management Service (RMS) in your organization then documents protected with that system might not be openable in Word 2003, Excel 2003 or PowerPoint 2003.
Instead of an open document you get the message:
“Unexpected error occurred. Please try again later or contact your system administrator”
You can’t save a document using RMS either.
According to Microsoft this is only a problem with Office 2003 – not Office 2007.
Redmond also says that the problem started on 11 Dec 2009 – which is quite curious. There were some security updates released on 8 Dec 2009. Is there a link between the two?
No, the problem is a security certificate expiration bug which is quite embarrassing for Microsoft. The company should be tracking certificate expiry dates and updating the certficate before the due date.
There’s a hotfix (ie interim patch) available. As we type this you have to call Microsoft Support to get the download, it’s not available on the Microsoft site.
The latest details on this bug will presumably appear on this KB article.
