Today for the first time when I went to access my SharePoint 2003 site (which is now such a valuable tool to me, I couldn’t imagine what I would do without it) I was confronted with a horrible IEXPLORE.EXE application error. The error reared it’s ugly face every time I tried to open up any document. The error only ever occurred on my PC. Anyone else who accessed the site could get to the documents without any problem at all.

At first I tried restarting my PC (you never know…) but that failed to help. I sought help from a fellow worker (thank you) and that led to IE7 being installed on my PC, just in case there was some corrupt DLL file. I originally had IE6. That also failed to help. I am happy with the install. I prefer IE7 so much more than IE6, but still, my problem remained.

I had to do something, so I googled for help. I came across so many forums, some suggesting to do a system restore, and then others warning that it doesn’t help…

Thankfully it didn’t take long before I came across a site by Paul Wu that helped solve the problem. Although his post was slightly different (he was using SharePoint 2007), the cause was ultimately the same.

The day before I had installed an Office 2003 program on my PC. I am also using Office 2007. The two different Office suites resulted in a file OWSSUPP.DLL becoming confused. It had no idea what version of Office to use. I had to disable the file (by renaming it). Once I followed Paul’s instructions, (which you can get to by going to his site) I was able to once again open up the documents. Thanks Paul!