MS Office apps won't open if no network

[scwhite]

Has anyone else experienced this problem? On my HP laptop, with a built-in wireless card, if I am away from my network (away from home), no MS Office apps will open. I was getting an error message that said something about how the program had generated an error and will be shut down. The problem persisted even when I upgraded to MS Office 2000. Incidentally, DeLorme Street Atlas 2003 was doing the same thing...

Here's how I finally worked around the problem. I have a network printer installed on the laptop. If I could not connect to that network printer, those apps would not open! So, I set up a local printer (it doesn't matter if you really have one or not, just install any local printer), then when I'm away from the network, I change the "phantom" local printer to default and everything works fine.

Go figure... Anyone have any suggestions as to the root cause? I can imagine that I'm not the only one with this problem. Microsoft and DeLorme were no help at all...

[mjc]

Sounds like they were timing out looking for the printer and not finding it.

[Budfred]

Just for comparison: I have a Dell Latitude laptop that runs Office 2000 fine when it is offline/off network.

[scwhite]

What good is a portable computer that won't run your Office apps or a mapping program? I spent a lot of time and energy trying to isolate the problem. Everything worked fine in Safe Mode. So, I listed which processes were running in the background while in regular mode, subtracted the Safe Mode processes, and tried eliminating the others one by one. I'm running Windows 2000 Pro on the laptop (an HP OmniBook 6100). Even with Administrator authority, I couldn't shut down some of the processes. One process, "mobsync.exe", kept coming back even after I disabled it with msconfig. I finally had to make a registry hack to get rid of it... I figured the problem had to be something trying to sync with the network. It wasn't any process associated with the network card. Giving credit where due, a tech at HP finally determined the problem was with the network printer. He must have seen that before... Anyhow, he said that it appeared to be a problem with MS Office. That doesn't explain the same problem with DeLorme. Never did determine which process was the culprit. So, I can live with the workaround.

[Budfred]

Check this article about mobsync. (http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win2000/t1036551723)

[scwhite]

Yeah, I have seen that also while surfing the Net for answers to my problem: "I opened up the mobsync.dll file in Word, and there is a specific reference to disabling the user-associated activation of it during startup. This is in plain text. The reference is to a registry key, and to remove it." That is actually what led me in the right direction for disabling the "mobsync" program. But I did NOT see the aforementioned dialoge when I opened up mobsync.dll in in Word, or in Notepad, etc. But I managed to figure out how to disable it by hacking the Registry, mostly via other websites with specific instructions how to do so. The main point here is that it WAS NOT relevant to my situation (see the string above). Eliminating "mobsync" did not solve my problem.