I had started doing a little regression testing on a product I work on recently. I’d been doing my dev under Vista with Office 2007, so I thought it’d be good to go back to Office 2000 for a bit.

I uninstalled 2007, installed Office 2k, then reinstalled Office 2007, rebooting along the way as is the norm (geez and here I thought it was 2007!).

Anyway, I fired up Word 2000, loaded a few doc files, closed it and did the same with Word 07. Everything looked good, so I fired up my app from within Word 2k. As Bob Kane might say, BOFF – BIFF – BLAMMO – KERPOWEE!

Hmmm. I actually crashed Word. That doesn’t happen too often (at least not anymore<g>).

So I started looking back through the relatively few changes I’d made to the code since the last time I knew it DID work under Word 2k. Nothing popped out.

So I stubbed out most of my code and discovered the problem was that when I was closing the Word document, via Application.Documents(x).Close, the document wasn’t actually being closed. Word still had it open. Which screwed up everything there after. Plus, virtually all my code dealing with Range locations (ie where things like fields and pictures are located in a document) was crashing Word left and right.

Now I’m starting to get a little panicky. I couldn’t have screwed things that badly.

So I’m staring at it blankly for a few minutes when it dawns on my. I don’t think I installed any service packs for Office 2k!

Hmm, check versions, sure enough, I hadn’t.

Ok, so do I have to uninstall Office 2007 again, just to get the old SPs on for 2k? I decide to throw caution to the wind and just start up the Office SP1 install, followed immediately by the Office SP3 install (SP3 didn’t roll up SP1 back in the day, wouldn’t you know).

Viola! My app’s running just fine, no crashes, documents close properly, etc.

Moral of the story. With those old apps (and OS’s, what with VMs being all the rage for testing), don’t forget the SPs!