IP: followup on OS X and MS Office v.X, OS X wins!

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Mark Laubach <mark () rainmakertechnologies com>
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 09:14:40 -0800
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Subject: followup on OS X and MS Office v.X, OS X wins!

Dave, for IP'ers:

Just to set things straight on OS X vs Microsoft Office v.X.  One of
your very knowledgeable IP'ers pointed the way to look at crash logs.
OS X is marvelous in this feature of being able to easily look at these
logs, once you know how to turn them on.

The problem I had was that the Microsoft Office code which is shared
by all the Office apps on startup was de-referencing a null pointer
when initializing fonts. This caused a memory protection error in one
of the threads and poof, any MS app died instantly.  Pure simple bad
coding on the part of MS.

The cause of the problem was that I copied a new font file into my
/Library/Fonts folder.  The new font was Albertus MT.  MS Office just
barfed.  I simply removed the font file and Office v.X was back running ok.
Note that no other application on the system had this problem.

Note also that no credit card info was needed to fix it!  Apple had
already included what was necessary to find and track this problem.
I didn't have to crawl through their website with my wallet leading
the way.

Mark
ps. For visual historians, Albertus with three changes is the font
used in The Prisoner.

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