Norton's infamous Office Plug-in option has reared its ugly head once
again.
Several months ago it was discovered that it caused conflicts with third-party
add-ins, such as WinFax and Adobe PDFMaker, in both Word and Excel. The Plug-in
would cause the applications to crash upon starting or exiting depending on
the add-in.
For those that have recently installed the Office XP SP-2 patch and use Norton
AntiVirus the Plug-in causes errors when you edit embedded objects such as Microsoft
Graph. And there have been reports of the inability to open any Office document.
If you encounter these problems after applying Service Pack 2 the only solution
thus far (other than not installing SP-2) is to disable the Plug-in option in
Norton.
The steps you need to take vary depending on the version of Norton AV you are
using. For most it's just a matter of changing it in the Norton Options:
- In Norton click Options
- In the section title Other click Miscellaneous
- In the center you'll find Enable Office Plug-in
- Remove the tick to disable it as shown in Figure 1 below
If you do not have the Office Plug-in option in the User Interface or if you
are using Norton AV Corporate Edition you'll need to unregister officeav.dll
using the Run Command.
Microsoft has developed a Knowledge Base Article on the embedded objects issue
and it provides instructions on how to disable the Office Plug-in:
OFFXP:
Cannot Edit Inserted Objects After You Install Office XP Service Pack 2
You can also visit the Symantec Knowledge Base for these instructions as well:
How
to enable and disable the Norton AntiVirus plug-in for Microsoft Office
According to both Microsoft and Symantec, disabling the option does not disable
your protection against macro virus infections. If you have all other scanning
options in place such as Auto-Protect and Email you will still be protected.
UPDATE:
If you use Norton Anti-Virus 2002, Symantec has release a new version of the Office
Plug-In and it can be obtained through Live Update. Once Live Update is complete
you will need to restart your computer before the change will take effect.
If you use a version of Norton Anti-Virus other than 2002 watch the following
Microsoft Knowledge Base article for future updates:
OFF: Latest Information on Using Microsoft Office with the Norton Anti-Virus
Microsoft Office Plug-In http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q329820
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