OFF97: "Access Violation" When You Add a Button to the OSB

When you add a new button to a toolbar on the Shortcut Bar in Microsoft Office 97, you may receive the following error message: and the Office Shortcut Bar stops responding.

This problem occurs when all of the following conditions are true:

• You are running Microsoft Windows NT 4.0.
  
  -and-
  
  
• The button you add to the Office Shortcut Bar points to a program that is an .exe file.
  
  -and-
  
  
• The program in question contains no icons.
  
  NOTE: A program may contain no icons if it is an MS-DOS-based program, or if no icons were added when it was created. For example, the following files do not contains icons:
  

        Doskey.exe    (MS-DOS-based program)
        Edlin.exe     (MS-DOS-based program)
        Taskman.exe   (Windows NT program with no icons)
  						

If the .exe file contains no icons, you cannot add a button to the Office Shortcut Bar that points to that program on a computer that is running Windows NT 4.0.

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. We are researching this problem and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.

To add a new button to the Microsoft Office 97 Shortcut Bar, use the following steps:

1. Click the control menu in the upper-left corner of the Office Shortcut Bar. On the menu that appears, click Customize.
2. Click the Buttons tab.
3. In the list of toolbars, click the name of the toolbar to which you want to add a button, and then click Add File.
4. In the Add File dialog box, select the program you want to add, and click Add.

The new button appears on the toolbar.

When you select a program to add to the toolbar in step 4, look at the icon to the left of the program name. If the icon is a generic window icon, the program you are adding may not contain icons. If this program is a .exe file, and you are using Windows NT 4.0, the Office Shortcut Bar may stop responding when you click Add.

This problem does not occur when any of the following conditions are true:

• You add a button that points to a program that is a .bat, .cmd, or .com file.
  
  -or-
  
  
• You add a button that points to a program that is a .exe file that contains one or more icons. (The icon appears in the Add File dialog box.)
  
  -or-
  
  
• You use the Office Shortcut Bar under Microsoft Windows 95.