paul.luminos.nl

My father recently asked for my help opening a Word document he had received from a colleague using a Mac. Evidently Outlook corrupts the file when saving it to disk, making it impossible to open it in Word without getting a File Conversion dialog similar to the one displayed below.

Problem

Opening any kind of Macintosh binary attachment from Outlook 2003 results in an error. JPEG images (.jpg) and Word documents (.doc) are affected in particular.

Solution

After looking long and hard, I discovered that the culprit is a Microsoft security update (MS08-15). There are two solutions:

Solution 1: Install the corresponding hotfix

Knowledge Base article 951678 provides a link (top of the page: "View and request hotfix downloads") to an irritatingly long procedure of requesting a hotfix, getting an e-mail, downloading the fix, inserting a password, unpacking it once, unpacking it again and finally installing it.

It's a pain to install, but it worked perfectly straight off the bat.

If you don't want to give your e-mail address to Microsoft, free anonymous e-mail solutions like Mailinator.com work, too.

Solution 2: Uninstall the guilty update

I urge you to apply the hotfix described above, but if for whichever reason you can't or don't want to, you can simply uninstall security update for Outlook 2003, MS08-15. (See this Knowledge Base article for information.)

Open the Control Panel, select Add or Remove Programs, and scroll down the list until you find "Security Update for Outlook 2003 (KB945432): OUTLOOK". Hit Remove to uninstall the problematic update.