More bittersweet news for me

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Although I'm only contracting, and we all know the evil overlords are going to integrate our nice, cosy, but very effective service desk into the dark empire soon, resulting in our stormtroopers being replaced by "log and flog" 1st line troops, I do actually have some good news.
Yesterday everyone (or so it seemed) of our 4K+ users seemed to develop an aversion to opening Excel files. I had a workaround figured out and the culprit identified within 3 hours. 2nd/3rd line didn't have a clue what was causing it, focussing on high server CPU averages and disk counters instead of client machines. 24 hours later they finally acknowledged the truth and rolled out an uninstall package for the offending item. Much kudos for me. My boss even named me rather than take the credit himself in emails to the server/SMS/desktop team (he's new, he'll learn to take credit for other peoples work soon enough).
Then, about an hour or so later, I was informed that I'd been chosen to replace one of the email admins at 1st line level (administering team mailboxes, coding outlook forms and just admin'ing the **** out of the email admin mailbox). A bit of hands on administering Exchange. Lovely.
The best thing is, my current 3 month contract is up in 3 weeks. There's no point training me for 2 weeks (in between busy times) then ditching me 3 weeks later so it is, in effect, a contract extension.

Life is now, for the meantime, officially good.

(BTW, if anyone has problems with Office 2003 SP3 excel files hanging for 5-10 before opening, especially ones with lots of graphs, fire me a PM and I'll let you know what we found out about it)

 

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Great work mate, well done and congrats for the extension

 

Good news indeed.

 

All hail the king of Excel!

Congratulations mate.

 

Congrats on the extension and as for the issue. Why not outline what the undelying cause was here. Could be one of those things we keep in our head as a distant memory then come across it ourselves in the future ...

 

Good job. Not sure why the other admins would look for server disk issues etc, sounded very much like a client issue to me. I've seen similar when the default printer of an end user was not available and the files being opened automatically tried to connect to the printer during startup of said application, so there it would be a driver or printer issue, but if everyone is able to open docs and the like, and only excel is hanging, then the problem shouldn't be on a server (assuming the excel files are stored on the same disks/machines as all other data).

 

They were looking at the server because the first half-dozen calls were all for the same server, so the master incident was punted through to the server team as a fault on that server. Despite my protests everyone still linked all excel issues to the same incident. When I had a minute I updated the master incident with my findings and workaround but I don't know if they bothered to revisit the notes until my manager went and had a quiet word on Friday morning.


@Modey: http://http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2501584.mspx.
Excel 2003 Office File Validation (OFV) opens workbooks slower across the network
According to those in the know it was a conflict between that and another update. I can't remember the update off the top of my head. The fix so far is to remove the validation tool. The workaround is to open the file from auto-recover. Files that were taking 5 mins+ to open normally opened immediately from there.

 

This thread proved very useful to me this morning, after remembering reading it a couple of days ago - thanks Soundian.