[brlug-general] Getting blood from a stone (a sad tale)

[Edmund Cramp]

This is the weakness of system restore - which system restore - I have 20 for this year alone.  I don't use Excel every day and have no idea when this actually happened - I first noticed the problem back in February but it could have been around for several months.

I think that this happened after one of the Microsoft security updates, so a system restore would just enable whichever exploit it patched until the time MS patch it.

Your point is a good one and this is exactly the situation that Microsoft tout the System Restore feature for - however in real life it's not as useful as you think in might be.

Another example of the class of problem (not as useful as you think is should be) is that the missing DLL only exists on the Office SBE disk - it's not present on the Standard Office or the Office Professional disks.

I should have copied the original CD to the laptop disk - but I realized the SBE features were pretty much brain dead unless you're running Exchange (something else that's not in the small print on the box) almost as soon as I'd installed it.

Edmund Cramp
-- 

-----Original Message-----
From: general-bounces at brlug.net [mailto:general-bounces at brlug.net] On Behalf Of Karthik Poobalasubramanian
Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2007 9:28 PM
To: general at brlug.net
Subject: Re: [brlug-general] Getting blood from a stone (a sad tale)

Ed,
How about system restore? I am guessing windows usually makes a checkpoint before it updates. That probably should rollback the updates.

Karthik



On 6/19/07, Edmund Cramp <eac at motion-labs.com> wrote:
> I realize that this is really not the place to post this - and I'll readily admit that it's my fault for running a MS product in the first place but I've been drawing a blank on this for several days now.  Does anyone have any useful comments on this problem?
>
> I have a copy of Office Small Business Edition 2003 installed on my PC and Excel doesn't work - it tells me that it needs SKU1CA.CAB to install ... and it used to work - I'm guessing that some recent "security update" has screwed it.  This would be a simple fix IF I still had the original installation CD ... but I don't.
>
> I've been calling IBM (it's a ThinkPad) who tell me that Lenovo handle this, and Lenovo tell me that they don't issue replacement CDs - I have to talk to Microsoft - and Microsoft say that since it's an OEM CD it's not their responsibility and that I should call the computer manufacturer who say ... well, you get the picture.
>
> Is anyone out there unfortunate enough to own a copy of Office SBE 2003 that I can borrow to get Excel running again?  Yes, I know the Office SBE is an even bigger heap of crappola than Office 2003 but it looked like a good idea at the time (it's never even heard of IMAP) ... I'm damned if I'm going to buy another copy of Orifice 2003 just to get this going.
>
> And before anyone double dunks me for running Orifice in the first place - we need Word for one damn help documentation option and we use Outlook throughout the company ... and Outlook is (in my experience) most horribly unstable if the rest of Orifice is not installed - bits of it gets lonely or something.
>
> I suppose I could always uninstall Excel and run the Open Office spreadsheet... it's looking like a better option all the time ... now if only there was an Open Office equivalent of Outlook.
>
> OK, fire at will...
>
> Edmund Cramp
> --
> Fairy Tales start "Once upon a time."  Army/Sea stories start "This is no shit."  Software proposals start "1.0."
>
>
>
>
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