A peculiar problem I had.

[Nick]

.. and took me over 6 months to sort. I am posting here in case anyone has the same symptoms.

First the scenerio;

1) WinNT4 SP3 (now sp5)
2) MSOffice Pro97
3) 83 machines - 2 with the problem.

I had a call on my helpdesk from a user saying that every time they used the MS toolbar to fire up an app it asked for a disc to be put in the A:\ drive - click abort twice and all works fine, until next login. (Any app, normal or a bespoke custom shortcut) - I tried all - delete, remove, refresh... you name it I tried!

i) I checked all obvious things.
No avail

ii) I then checked all UN-obvious things
No avail

iii) I completely uninstalled MSoffice as Admin and user and re-installed.
No Avail... (this really got me beat!)

iv) I deleted ALL profile(s) and re-installed again.
No Avail...

The bloody thing still looked to the A:\ drive with the same bloody message everytime any shortcut was accessed via the MSOffice Toolbar.

Abort - Retry - Ignore

:-) I solved it this week, and I am a relieved geek.

It was caused by Winzip (nothing against the s/w) when the user had 'launched' the winzip.exe from a floppy disc {in the A:\ drive !], and then extracted a word *.doc similar. All the keys in the registery were then pointing to... yep, you guessed it... the bloody A:\ drive - but... WinZip (I am guessing here) was not installed on any of the two machines with this problem.

So... does Winzip on every execute (or self extract???) try to psuedo-install inself... or is it summat else?

Really relieved,
Nick

[Anonymous]

Had a similar problem. Pulled a *.doc off a floppy and since the *.doc's name was being kept in the Recent Documents list, W98 would search the floppy drive to find the file. I cleared the Recent Documents list to end the annoyance. Could this be your case too?

[Nick]

No, I went all through that in the early days of this problem. It was keys in the reg that where associated with winzip that had entries like "a:\winzip.exe" mydoc.doc etc. I just splattered the lot and all is ok again.

Nick