Every month the BugBlog picks its Bug of the Month, representing the most significant bug found in the past month. Sometimes, the bug will be the one which could potentially cause the most damage; sometimes it will be the bug which affects the most users. And sometimes, it will be the bug that is just the most interesting bug. This bug will be selected either from the free Bug of the Day, or from the subscription-only BugBlog Plus.
The Bug of the Day for October, 2005 was written on September 22:
Installing Adobe Acrobat 7.0 in some cases may interfere with Microsoft Word. According to Microsoft, these are some actions that may not be saved: changing the workspace (toolbars, views, etc) in Word; creating a macro; changing the default font; adding a toolbar. The next time you start Word, these changes aren't saved. Another problem may be when you open Word. You will see this error message
There is insufficient memory. Word cannot display the requested font.
You may also see visual c++ runtime errors. According to Microsoft, the problem is in the COM add-in in from Adobe that gets saved to \Acrobat 7.0 \PDFMaker\Office. Microsoft does not give any indication of whether just some users of Acrobat 7 have these problems. Two workarounds from Microsoft: Manually save macros, preferences, and custom settings in Word; or use the Save All command. They also suggest contacting Adobe. See the details at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906899.
Why this bug? Mostly because it involves a bad interaction between two very popular programs — Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat. This isn't a damaging security bug that could allow an attacker to gain control of your computer. However, this is the type of error message that often has computer users muttering under their breaths.
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