‘X’ Greyed Out (Office 2k, WinNT 4.0 SP6)

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The ability to close all MS programs – i.e. MSWord, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Internet Explorer – by using the ‘X’ in the upper right hand corner of all applications is greyed out. According to the user, the ability to exit a program via the “x” in the upper right hand corner was there in the morning and then later in the day she noticed it was gone. I have replaced the firm and normal.dots, rebooted the pc but the ‘x’ is still greyed out. Under Addins are Adobe Acrobat and DeltaView. I verified that no one has programmatically changed our login script and that no other applications have been added to the pc, I reset toolbars. Can anyone tell me where else I might look or has anyone encountered this before?

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Whatever this bug is, I know a lot of firms would like to catch it!

Okay, that’s wasn’t helpful. If I think of anything…

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Are you using DOCS Open as your DMS? I ran a quick search in DOCS’ Knowledge Base on closing applications using the X, and I found several articles on the subject. Of course, they claim it’s a “feature” and not a bug.

Hope this helps!
Becky

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Thanks for the response. Actually we are moving to DocsOpen but not as yet. I know that on our pcs with DocsOpen we still have the ‘x’ but not with Excel, oddly enough. She logged on with her own i.d. at another pc and the ‘x’ is restored. At her own pc, logged with another id. or as herself the x is greyed out. This is one of our Library staff so she’s on the internet a lot (having to click on the internet icon ‘e’ to close those pesky popups is a real time waster for her), Lexus-Nexus, Outlook, our local intranet, etc.

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To close IE windows, Alt+F4 might be a good temporary workaround. A bit of a stretch for one hand, but…

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We have used DocsOpen for years and I can attempt to explain why only the Excel X is greyed out……

MS Word, Powerpoint, & Visio use what is called ODMA (Open Document Management Architecture) to provide the integration between themselves and DOCS Open. This layer intercepts File/Open,Close etc commands and passes control to the document management system. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have not yet built ODMA support into Excel so you still have to use an add-in macro that intecepts the commands……. Now for some time both the Docs Open & Groupwise document management developers have been unable to get this add-in to intercept the X close button correctly… so instead they simply disable it!!!!

Sorry for the long-winded explanation but hope it helps…

Belinda

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Yes! That is IT. Thanks very much indeed.

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Not sure if this will help you, but I found a solution to my problem with the X dimmed out.
We are using Novell GroupWise for email, and the user that was having this problem had
GroupWise installed with the ‘Integrate with Excel’ option turned on.

This causes the X to be greyed out. Novell has a TID on their knowledgebase ( http://support.novell.com/search/kb_index.jsp )
that addresses this and gives the solution. The TID is # 10017211.

Microsoft also has a solution (not quite as in-depth), # Q260199

Hope this helps. Have a great 4th!

George

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Thanks very much George! I will check that out when back to work next week. Appreciate the post.

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