by Ed Wynne, with some cleanup work by Drew Thaler – released 7/13/96
What it does
Makes Microsoft Word’s spelling checker work again, when it’s stopped.
Um, why would you ever use Word?
I wouldn't. :-) But installing Office and making it work on several hundred computers is unfortunately part of my job at the University of Michigan. Pity me.
Ok, so why's this patch necessary?
Microsoft Word stores the locations of its supporting files — like the spell-checker — in probably the most idiotic way possible. If you thought the RegDB thing was bad, listen to this.
The locations are stored as part of a 'STR ' resource in the Word Settings file. Okay, not bad so far, right? Well, look at the actual strings: they encode the name of the disk, followed by some random garbage. Looking more closely, the garbage consists of three bytes of $06 $07 $08, followed by the directory id of the Microsoft folder.
(rant mode on) That's right, straight hex coding... in a STRING RESOURCE!!!! Not to mention that directory ids are probably the most godawful stupid way to encode information like that; duplicate the folder and replace it, or copy it to another machine, or restore it from a backup tape, and pffft, it’s broken. And just TRY getting all the settings to 300 machines without running the installer on each of them! Sure, you can get Word up and running, but good luck getting the spell-checker to work!!! (rant mode off)
[Microsoft programmers REALLY have no idea what an alias is, do they?]
So anyway, this is a hack that was thrown together on very short notice by a friend of mine to fix this problem. I didn't do much other than clean it up a bit and make it slightly more friendly, and of course I added the icons. :-) It just munges your Word Settings file so the spell checker should (probably) work thereafter.
Why two versions?
The extension and the application do essentially the same thing. You only need one of them. The app is designed to be a one-shot standalone, while the extension is designed to run every time you start up. The extension is quiet, while the app posts a notification informing you of its success or failure.
In our labs we needed the extension because of our autoloading process. But I put the application with the keyserved software distribution so that users could run it (once is all that's needed) after they'd copied Microsoft Office onto their hard drives.
See also
Microsoft Installer Patch — get rid of that ugly Microsoft eyesore that gets created in the root level of your hard drive.
Legal stuff
There’s absolutely no warranty or guarantee whatsoever attached to Word Fixer. Use it at your own risk. It worked for me. Full source is provided, along with a CodeWarrior 9 project.
Word Fixer is hereby placed into the public domain.
