Can you please specify which shortcuts do you use (StartMenu or File/New Menu 
of the application). 

For me it works perfect on NT4 and Win2000 with and without installing MAth.

Assigning this bug to me.

Need more Info about how to reproduce this bug. Like Martin Hollmichel I was 
also able to start every apps.

Bug wasn`t reproducible and is due to missing further information closed.

I mailed Thorsten with an offer to supply him with any info he needs.
Why is this issue closed as not reproducible?
If in my job I rejected all defects I couldn't instantly reproduce, I'd never 
get any of them fixed at all.

THe bottom line is I have a vanilla W2K install and OpenOffice does not work AT 
ALL. Isn't that something worth investigating?
All my other apps (including the infamous Mozilla) start up just fine, so 
obviously there is a problem here

Hi Jacek!

I'am Thorstens Teamleader and I have to take care that he's not wasting too 
much time with your problem. The Bug was closed as "not reproducible" because 
it is was not reproducible, understand? So what do you want? A public vote if 
your problem is a common problem? Seems that most people do not have this 
problem, so what? If you can give us a hint what your problem is, nice, but 
what we won't do is comparing every file on your machine with every file on our 
machines. I will close this bug again, soon. Then you can play this reopen-game 
with me.

Regards, Uwe Luebbers

No need to get so upset Uwe, if you guys don't feel like investigating this no 
problem. I was just naive enough to assume I could help with some beta testing.
I guess I'll have to stick with Word, right? Bye.

Hi Jacek!

I assume "reproduce" has something to with "investigating", am I right? I mean 
maybe we don't know what investigating is, we just try to reproduce a problem. 
We've tried it before we made this version public and we've tried it today, we 
tried it on different machines and with different users, is that investigating? 
So we have done that. BTW, even if you want to do betatesting for word (I 
thougt they are final ;-)), try to breakdown every problem so far that somebody 
else can see it on his machine.

Still regards, Uwe Luebbers

P.S. Do you have a openoffice line in your sversion.ini?   

Yes, I do have a sversion.ini with the openoffice line in it.

Unfortunately, I removed OpenOffice since I couldn't run (I had to manually 
delete the dir, since Add/Remove programs didn't work). I wanted to reinstall 
it, but now I can't even do that. When I unzip the install and run setup.exe it 
just dies like all the OPenOffice components previously (it did run just fine 
the first time around).

I would be more than glad to pass you on any info (debug traces, dumps of the 
processes list, whatever you might require), but as of right now I'm dead in 
the water. Can't neither run the app nor even reinstall it. If you have any 
ideas, let me know.

Do I need SP1 for W2K in order to run OpenOffice? I'm on W2K 5.00.2195

Best regards,
Jacek

Hi Jacek!

As far as I know right now, you don't need SP1. But for a new installation you 
have to remove the openoffice-line in the sversion.ini for shure. Maybe you try 
to clean the registry, looking for openoffice. Then you can try a new 
installation. Please answer Martins question.

cu, Uwe

For Martin's question, I used the Start Menu -> Programs -> OpenOffice.org 625 
shortcuts (sorry, first time I just mailed back the e-mail instead of using the 
issuezilla web interface, that's probably why my initial answer to his question 
is not here).

For Uwe's suggestion, I removed all traces of the app (sversion.ini plus any 
registry settings with "openoffice" in them), but unfortunately it still 
doesn't work.

setup.exe still doesn't start up...bugger :-(

I'm out of ideas and I understand it's hard for you to help me if you can't 
reproduce it. Is it at least possible to run the EXE in some sort of trace mode 
(with command line parms or anything like) that would generate some sort of 
execution log and maybe give you an idea where it's dying?

Thanks for all your help,
Jacek

I seem to be having the same problem on my machine as Jacek, running OpenOffice
V6.19 on a Windows NT 4.0 machine with SP6 (AMD 850 Athlon chip w/384 MB
memory).  I click on the application shortcut but I never get to the application
interface.  I do see the "OpenOffice.org" splash screen, but then the executable
file soffice.exe just sits there and does nothing/gets hung.  I can see it
sitting there in Windows Task Manager.  This happens for all the apps I try,
except for setup which does run (but crashes during deinstall - but that's
another issue).  I have deinstalled and cleaned all the settings from my
registry, then reinstalled, still to no avail.  I have tried version 6.25 as
well with no luck.

Could this be an issue relating to Java? If the Java install on the machine is
damaged, could it be causing OpenOffice to hang?

Ha, you know what just happened?  It finally came up after about 8 minutes of
sitting there, while I was typing this bug report.  Jacek - if you check task
manager, do you see the "soffice.exe" executable sitting there, or does it just
dump out?  What happens if you let it run without killing it (which I have been
doing until just now)?

It seems in my case, the application IS INDEED RUNNING, but it is getting hung
up on something for a long time, making it seem like it's hung or dead.  If you
wait long enough it does manage to finally get through and run okay after that.

BTW, thought also to mention this.  The problem originally started when I was
running V6.25 and it crashed while I was working on a text document.  After
that, the next time I ran it, it asked if I wished to recover my work and I said
yes.  Then it just got hung up and I killed it from Windows Task Manager after
about 30 seconds.  Then I tried deinstalling and going back to V6.19, with no
success.  Before then I didn't have this problem.

Also, understand that people like Jacek and myself very much want to help this
project work in any practical way by reporting bugs or doing whatever else can
be done, but sometimes we get exasperated when encountering a problem like this
(because it can just ruin your whole day, ya know?). Nonetheless, the work by
your team is very much appreciated. We hope to see this thing succeed in the
very near term and will continue to support your efforts as best we can.

Unfortunately, I did NOT have an soffice.exe running in my Task Manager, I 
remember that. Also, the app never came up for me. I would start it up around 9 
AM, wait a minute and then I would return to work, meaning I was logged into my 
PC until 5-6 PM and nothing ever came up.

As you may recall, I can't even re-install OpenOffice since the setup.exe in 
the installer dies as well now. I just run it and looked at Task Manager but 
it's not there at all. In other words, it seems to die pretty fast for me, 
instead of hanging around forever.

So, in hinsight, I think I have a different problem, although with the same 
symptoms. Also, unlike korhan, I never get to see the OpenOffice splashscreen,
while he does.

The new openoffice version (627) is available now. This version includes many 
bugfixes and is more stable than the previous versions. We`ve found no problems 
in installing and deinstalling. Maybe this version is the solution to your 
problems which we weren`t able to reproduce. My suggestion is: deinstall and 
remove all old openoffice-programs and -parts (so that no old "waste" of 
openoffice is left on the system) and install the new openoffice 627. 

Sorry, cleaned up the PC again and tried 627.
Same thing: I can't even install it, the setup.exe just dies with no error 
message.
I was able to install 625 yesterday on a different machine (NT 4 SP 6), no 
problem, it's just my W2K worstation that caused openoffice to die.

OK, I've found the problem. I'm not sure whether it's OpenOffice or W2K. Here's 
the rundown:
a) our MIS dept. install an ID called ADMINISTRATOR for each PC (in my case the 
PC/domain name is JACEKF) which has all the proper admin rights
b) my user id JACEKF (on the STS1 network domain at work here) IS part of the 
Administators group and has full admin rights therefore on this PC.

Yet, somehow there is a difference between me (i.e. user STS1\JACEKF) and the 
ADMINISTATOR account (JACEKF\ADMINISTRATOR).

When I logged in as JACEKF\ADMINISTRATOR, I was able to both successfully run 
the setup and all the OpenOffice apps.

However, when I logged back in as STS1\JACEKF I did not even have the 
OpenOffice shortcut folder in my Start -> Programs! 
What is worse, if I run the apps directly from the folder they would abort 
with "sversion.ini not found". I found two copies of that file, one in the 
administator's profiles and one under JACEKF.000 profiles (which did not have 
the openoffice line it, i.e. it was empty).

I copied the data from sversion.ini in the administator's profile to mine, as 
well as the whole shortcut folder.

Now, I can run the app as STS1\JACEKF with no problems.

So, either
a) there is something totally wrong with my security setup on this PC 
(unlikely, our MIS does this for 800 users)
b) there is some weird bug in W2K with admins and users being on different 
domains
c) maybe there is some sort of bug in OpenOffice that hangs if it is not being 
installed from the actual ADMINISTATOR account

At the very least, it would be great if OpenOffice could do a security check at 
startup to verify it has all the permissions it needs, otherwise any non-
technical user would get totally lost in this W2K security mess and never 
figure out what happened...

Good luck!
Jacek

Jacek seems to have hit upon something common to us both.  I use my NT machine
logged in as ADMINISTRATOR, but I have renamed the ADMINISTRATOR account to
KORHAN.  However, my profile directory is still WINNT40\PROFILES\ADMINISTRATOR.
 Windows has never been very good at keeping this stuff straighforward or
logical, but anyway, could this somehow be the source of the problem?

Anyway, ever since it started up that one time after continually getting hung, I
have not experienced this problem.  I will upgrade as soon as I get a chance to
build 627 and see if I have any problems with that.  At this point it seems
unlikely it will crop up again.

OK, you guys are gonna flip when you hear this:
it's 3 hours after my previous post and all of a sudden OpenOffice won't run 
again (I don't recall even logging out of my PC, so nothing had changed!).
The only way I can get it to run is if I check the "Run as different user" 
checkbox in properties and run it as JACEKF\ADMINISTRATOR

I am totally confused right now...one way or another there needs to be better 
detection in OpenOffice of this W2K security weirdness.

OK, I think I found the real problem:
in the 3 tab in the shortcut properties (Security) the user group "Everyone" 
was missing. I looked at some other apps I have that run just fine and all of 
them had "Everyone" in the list of user groups allowed to run this program.
As soon as I added "Everyone" in the security tab all the apps now run fine.

I presume this is a problem with the OpenOffice installer and the way it 
creates the shortcuts, but I'm sure Thorsten would know better than me.

One way or another, I think we now know what is the real problem behind all of 
this.

I just wanted to let you know that after my last solution of adding 
the "Everyone" group to the list of users allowed to run the shortcut, well, 
that stopped working after about 1 day with nothing being changed on the PC in 
terms of security settings.

The only way I can run any of the apps is if I select "Run as different user" 
in the shortcut properties and then run it as JACEKF\ADMINISTRATOR instead of 
my account.

Why the previous solution only worked for a few hours is beyond me.

Seems to be a problem caused due to insufficient user rights or some kind of 
wrong network settings. Task will therefor be closed. 

Issue closed !