Browser Crashes when Opening Office Documents from SharePoint

Browser Crashes when Opening Office Documents from SharePoint

Are you experiencing browser crashes when accessing Office Documents in SharePoint? Something like this:

I recently encounted an issue where Internet Explorer 6 and 7 would crash when opening Office documents on SharePoint 2003. Since it didn't happen to all users, it was pretty obvious that some client configuration was incompatible with the component SharePoint uses to open Office documents.

Have you ever noticed a special dialog is diplayed when you click on a Word document in a document library?

Under the hood, this dialog is displayed by an ActiveX control. If you view the source of a document library page, you will see the SharePoint.OpenDocuments component being called.

For example:

var url='http://moss2007/sites/documents/projectscopestatement.doc';var od3 = new ActiveXObject('SharePoint.OpenDocuments.3');od3.ViewDocument3(window,url,3,'');

What is the cause of this problem?

As it turns out, some users had all or parts of Office 2007 installed such as SharePoint Designer. Office installed a component, "owssup.dll" that causes the issue.
How do you fix it?
Update: Download the hotfix from Microsoft here.

Here are the steps prior to the hotfix:

1.) In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12
2.) Delete owssup.dll. Make a backup if you are uncomfortable with this step
3.) Run the Office diagnostics by selecting Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Diagnostics. This tool will find the mising component and install the "correct" version.
For those users that are unable to complete these steps, the workaround is to right click Office documents and select Save As until it can be resolved.