Word, RoboHELP and the Concept Virus

[Tiffany Crotogino Munoz <Crotogino-Munoz_Tiffany/CORP_LABS -at- CST -dot- CA>]

Hi!

<Rant mode on> I have recently been through a
nightmarish situation involving Word 6, the
Concept Virus (which seems to come with Word!)
and RoboHELP. It seems that the Concept virus
(which Microsoft has been aware of since Jan
'95--they even include a macro that scans your
executable and files, and then "fixes" the ugly
situation) attacks your template files, and from
there goes about making a mess of your
documents. Needless to say, the darned thing got
a hold of my RoboHELP templates and
single-mindedly went about making an absolute
mess of my projects. It took the better part of
a month, an incredible amount of time from my
Internal Support technician and hours of
long-distance to finally straighten the mess out
and compile a useable help file (or _any_ help
file, for that matter).

Has anyone else run into these difficulties? And
why do we seem to have to resign ourselves to
this kind of treatment from Microsoft? As more
than one person in my office has pointed out
during this fiasco, if it were any company other
than Microsoft, legal action would probably have
been initiated ages ago by some enraged
customer.

While Microsoft usually passes off its "bugs" as
"features", I'm hard-pressed to call this "bug"
anything other than that. And a darned malignant
bug at that...

Comments? Suggestions (change products is
certainly high on my list)?

<Rant mode off> Thanks for listening. I really
had to vent a little on that one.

Tiffany Crotogino  Munoz
Technical Writer
CS&T
Montreal, QC   Canada
tiffany -at- cst -dot- ca


My opinions are mine, not the company's. If they
want to share them, that's fine. If they don't,
that's fine, too.