[WinPartners] PowerPoint 2003 won't open hyperlinks without warning...

[Kerem B Limon]

I've got a nasty Office problem for which I cannot seem to resolve or find a
documented, *working* fix.

I have a high-profile user who frequently (daily) uses PowerPoint to give
presentations. A lot of his presentations contain hyperlinks to video files,
which are activated by clicking on embedded action buttons throughout the
presentation.

Since we upgraded him to a new Windows XP laptop with Office 2003 instead of
Office XP, he's having trouble with this in two ways:

- Upon clicking one of the action buttons to launch a video, he gets a warning
entitled "Microsoft Office" that says:

Opening <absolute-path-to-hyperlinked-file-without-quotes>

Some files can contain viruses or otherwise be harmful to your computer.
It is important to be certain that this file is from a trustworthy source.

Would you like to open this file?

[OK] [Cancel]

- The hyperlinked document (video, etc.) always opens in the background, behind
the PowerPoint presentation and the presenter has to Alt-Tab to it or browse to
it from the Task Bar to bring it to the foreground.

Needless to say, both of these are highly interrupting and amateurish looking.
Google'ing for this, I've found

http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00406.htm
http://officeone.mvps.org/download/hyperlink_warning.html
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=829072

and despite having done the Registry mods there and turned off the macro level,
the warnings continue. The last link indicates that the error message I am
getting (without quotes around the path) are coming from hlink.dll and not
Office, but Microsoft (or anyone else) doesn't seem to have instructions for
fixing this. I've even played with lowering IE zone security settings, to no
avail.

Some other posts in Google Groups suggest converting the Action Item from
Hyperlink to 'Run Program' items, but that implies re-editing hundreds of
presentations which worked fine under XP on another laptop, and worse, changing
all of the relative paths to the videos to absolute paths, which makes them
totally unportable.

Again, this was not a problem on another Windows XP machine with Office XP, but
downgrading to Office XP on this machine doesn't fix the problem. I am guessing
the very act of installing Office 2003 has upped a DLL which doesn't get
downgraded and is causing all this problem.

Any suggestions?

-Kerem


Kerem B. Limon
kerem.limon at mit.edu /e-mail