Office 2008: Serious ownership, font problems

Wednesday, January 23rd

Incorrect user ownership Joel Bruner reports that the Microsoft Office 2008 package incorrectly sets the owner of several files it installs to user ID 502. In a nutshell, this means that whatever user is assigned this user ID (502) will have full read/write access to the following directories:

• /Library/Automator/ (if it doesn?t exist already)
• /Library/Fonts/Microsoft
• /Library/Application Support/Microsoft
• /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008

By default, the first administrator on a Mac OS X is assigned user ID 501. The way the Office installer works, even if the administrator installs the program, user ID 502 will own the aforementioned directories. This applies even if User ID 502 doesn't yet exist. As soon as an account with that ID is created, it will have read/write access to the directories.

As noted by Joel Bruner, even an uninstallation of Office won't resolve this issue:

"'But, there's an Uninstaller!', you say? Yes there is and it does a lovely job of moving the Microsoft Office 2008 folder to the Trash, but it kinda misses the Application Support folder, the fonts folder (and moving the disabled fonts back), and all 97 automator actions... tsk tsk. Still, it was free!"

This is a significant security issue, to which we expect Microsoft will soon respond.

Serious font rendering problems Office 2008 applications may exhibit some significant font display issues. MacFixit reader Daniel Crowley reports that when opening a document containing font in the typeface Tahoma, letters were incorrectly drawn (specifically, a "C" turned into an "A"). He sent in a screenshot of the same document opened in Word 2008, Pages 3 (Demo) and in Leopard's QuickLook:

Daniel writes:

"The initial letter C of the work Consultant is rendered in Word 2008 as "A". Clicking on the work changes the letter rendered and scrolling off screen changes it too.  This problem occurs even after a restart of the machine (iMac 7.1) and after opening and closing Word 2008.  Following installation, there was widespread font corruption in a number of non-Microsoft applications (eg Safari 3.0).  This resolved after a machine restart. This a very serious problem since Word may display mission critical text such as codes, passwords or serial numbers incorrectly.  Ordinary text might be figured by the context."

We previously reported that font or font cache corruption could cause problems launching Office 2008 applications. In those cases, running the tool Font Doctor proved effective for some users; it may in this case as well.

Entourage rules ignored Some users are reporting that Entourage 2008 ignores old rules carried over from Entourage 2004. Danny writes:

"Entourage does not follow any of the rules it imported from office 2004.  I have gone in to edit and re-save these rules, it still ignores them.  Have not yet tried deleting them all and recreating them."

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

Previous coverage:

• Office 2008 crashes and fixes; Spaces incompatibility

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