Explorer Crashes With New Website by Publisher

[Bradford Lee]

Problem:
When I create web pages with Publisher 2003 on my XP Pro SP2 machine and
publish them, the website crashes the first time any given computer opens any
page for the first time. You go to the home page, it crashes, you go back,
that's fine, but when you go to a second page, it crashes.

Version Background:
I've been a Publisher user for years, back to Office 97 or that era. I have
a simple website I do for our rec sports league and I use Publisher. Using
the 2002 version on an early XP Pro PC, it works fine. When I bought a new PC
with the newer XP Home Media version and Publisher 2003, the crashes started.
I happened to also purchase a new laptop for work recently (same OS), so I
installed the 2002 version of Publisher on it, but I get the same results.

Of Interest:
When I use the old configuration, a simple page might create say index.htm
and then in the index_files folder, it may have four images (image1.gif,
etc). When I do the exact same page with the newer software combination, I
get about a dozen files in that folder, including something xml and an extra
htm page. Its these files that seem to be causing the problem.

Thanks in advance,
Bradford

 

[DavidF]

This has been reported in this newsgroup before, and there has never been a
satisfactory solution, or explanation. It seems it might have something to
do with posting on a unix server vs. a windows server, or...

Here is a link to a thread where we tried to work this out:
http://groups.google.com/group/micr...lnk=gst&q=IE+crashes&rnum=10#0884b7f8a18e88df

Try going to Tools > Options > Web tab and unchecking "Enable
incremental...", "Rely on VML...", "Allow PNG...", and changing your
Encoding to Western European (ISO)...or unicode (UTF-8).

The change in the HTML output files, doesn't seem to have anything to do
with this issue...just a result of the HTML coding engine that is used in
Pub 2003. If you make the changes I suggested above, you will get cleaner
output, but Pub 2003 will always make multiple copies of your images, in an
effort to provide the best image depending on which browser.

DavidF

 

[Bradford Lee]

David,

Just wanted to drop you a quick thankyou for taking the time to respond.
Sorry I'd missed the ealier thread. I did search for such info, but didn't
find it. I followed your suggestions. In my re-install of the 2002 version,
those boxes were already unchecked, so only the change to the ISO version of
the encoder was new. It didn't solve the problem though :-(

Thanks,
Bradford

 

[DavidF]

Sorry you didn't have better luck. As I indicated in the referenced thread,
at this point it would seem that the only known solution at this point is to
switch to a windows server. And even then, this is based on testing just one
Publisher file with this bug.

DavidF

 

[DavidF]

As a follow up, given that you said you have used Publisher since 97, if you
have Pub 2000, then you could load that to do your website only. It is a in
my opinion the best version for websites, for many reasons, plus I have
never read anywhere it crashes IE. If you do this, you might find it best to
copy and paste the design elements between the two, rather than saving as
the Pub 2003 or 2002 file to Pub 2000, as that usually creates formatting
problems in my experience.

Also, you can ask your webhost if there is perhaps any setting on their end
that might cause Publisher websites to crash. They will probably tell you
not to use Publisher. You could also ask them if they could move your site
to a windows platform. And depending on how committed you are to using
Publisher and your host, I can give you a reference to the windows based
webhost I use, and it will cost you less than $5 a month.

Though there is no guarantee, Microsoft will be releasing IE 7 very soon,
and its possible that whatever is causing IE to crash will be fixed in the
new version, although that doesn't solve the problem for those who don't
upgrade.

And finally, within the referenced thread I mentioned an alternative to
Publisher for building your site. Nvu. It's a free open source program
available from http://www.nvu.com . Maybe it is time to move away from
Publisher for this purpose. I have also read good things about the Serif's
WebPlus 10:
http://www.serif.com/webplus/webplus10/index.asp

Good luck, and if you ever find a solution, please post it. I hate giving
into a bug without figuring out a workaround.

DavidF