Office 2000 programs can browse restricted drives

After you establish a group policy to restrict access to a drive by selecting the Hide these specified drives in My Computer and Prevent access to drives from My Computer options, you can use a Microsoft Office program to browse and read the contents of the drive.

This problem occurs when your operating system is Microsoft Windows 2000. The problem occurs because of the way that policies are applied. When you restrict access to a drive by establishing a group policy, restrictions apply to users, but they do not apply to services and programs. Because the browse feature is performed through a program such as Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word, the program is permitted to view the drive. As a result, when you define a group policy and select the Hide these specified drives in My Computer and Prevent access to drives from My Computer options on a specific drive, the drive is read-only with respect to Microsoft Office 2000 programs.

To resolve this problem, obtain and install Microsoft Office 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3) or a later version. The problem does not occur in any version of Microsoft Office XP or Microsoft Office 2003. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: The English version of this hotfix has the file attributes (or later file attributes) that are listed in the following table. The dates and times for these files are listed in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). When you view the file information, it is converted to local time. To find the difference between UTC and local time, use the Time Zone tab in the Date and Time tool in Control Panel.

Date	        Time	  Version	Size	   File name	   Platform
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
10/27/2000	01:30a	 0.0.0.0000	544,256	   MSO9.msp	     x86
10/27/2000	01:37a	 0.0.0.0000	2,904,576  MSO9_Admin.msp    x86
05/04/2000	04:53p	 0.0.0.0000	3,059	   Readme.txt	     x86

After the hotfix is installed, the following files will have the listed attributes or later:

Date	     Time	 Version     Size	File name    Platform
----------------------------------------------------------------------
10/26/2000   09:34a	9.0.0.4625   5,595,185	Mso9.dll     x86

The problem that is described in the "Symptoms" section applies to all versions of Office 2000 before Office 2000 SP3.

Note After Office 2000 is installed and the group policy is applied, you can configure a Microsoft Office program to browse and open files on a restricted drive. However, you cannot save files to the drive.

For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: