Office 2003 SP3 and EV Client Compatability

You may have seen some questions on the support forum about Office 2003 SP3 and compatibility with EV, so we thought we'd post this article to clear up any mis-understandings about what works and what doesn't.

The problem that some customers have found after applying SP3 is that when a user opens an archived message with more than 2048 recipients on the TO,CC or BCC field, an error will occur. We've already updated our Compatibility Guide and mentioned that the EV client will work with SP3 but have added a footnote that you need to read our Technote http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/296572.htm which has more information about the issue. Also, we still don't recomend putting SP3 on the EV server, this shouldn't be an issue for most of you and we will update the compatbility guide once this has been certified.

So obviously this is not going to be a major issue for all customers but certainly if you have messages in your organisation with more than 2048 recipients  in one of the address fields, you will get some support calls if you roll out SP3. However, we wanted to clarify that the problem isn't actually an EV issue, it's actually a problem with a change that MS introduced in SP3 and is documented in the following article. They have now issued a roll up fix which works around the problem, basically there is now a new registry key which you can set to increased the default value of 2048 which causes the problem to occur, you'll need to set this to a value that suits your organisation.  We might introduce something into a future EV client that will automatically set these reg keys but this is currently under discussion but for now if you want to roll out SP3 and fix this issue, you'll need to set a GPO to set these reg keys to the desired value for your environment.

Here's the Microsoft information on this issue , along with a summary from their KB articles.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948074/- You cannot open an .msg e-mail message file in Outlook 2003 after you install Office 2003 Service Pack 3

Symptoms

You install Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3 (SP3) on a computer that is running Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. When you try to open an Outlook Message Format (.msg) e-mail message file that contains many attachments or many recipients, you may experience one of the following symptoms:

Resolution

To resolve this problem, apply hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948073/

Then, perform one or both of the following actions:

•Add the AttachmentMax value to the registry if there are many attachments in an .msg file.