Cocktail for system crash

A mix of Microsoft products has proved to be a troublesome cocktail for local electronics company Hagemeyer.

The company's travelling staff had to contend with frozen laptops whenever they tried to send mail via Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.5, service pack 2. Users were able to access mail from the Microsoft Exchange 5.5 server withservice pack 4, but on clicking 'reply', the machines froze and had to be switched off.

Hagemeyer notifed Microsoft of the problem three weeks ago and the company was able to replicate it. Since then, the fault report has made its way to "second-level response", according to a spokesperson for Microsoft.

The spokesperson said Microsoft is still troubleshooting the problem, and noted that although it had not previously been reported to the software manufacturer, it did posses "bug-like symptoms".

Microsoft informed Hagemeyer it had determined the problem had not been in relation to the Exchange database, but was now scouring the IE database for bugs.

The Microsoft spokesperson also noted that it was difficult to ascertain the exact cause of the problem due to the lack of diagnostic information that could be drawn from the Windows 98 operating system. The spokesperson also noted that it was unlikely the problem will be solved quickly.

A spokesperson from Hagemeyer said that even when they tried to remove IE 5.5 sp2 from the system, and reload an earlier version, the problem still continued, which led them to believe that a modification to a .dll file in the operation system is to blame for the crash.

Hagermeyer's travelling staff are currently using Netscape 6.1 to access and respond to their e-mail, with no problems, the spokesperson said.

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