OFFXP: Microsoft Does Not Recommend Installing Office XP from a Web Server

This article describes the risks that occur when installing Office XP from a Web server. Microsoft does not recommend that you perform a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) installation of Office XP from a Web server as described in the "More Information" section of this article.

When you install Microsoft Office XP from a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), native support of the Windows Installer is used. When Windows Installer copies files from an HTTP location, Windows Installer uses Wininet to download the file to the temporary Internet files cache before copying the files to their actual installation location. The temporary Internet files cache is not secure and the client system may be compromised. This risk may exist for all Microsoft Installer (.msi) files installed from a URL, and is not specific to installing Office XP.

Note Installing Office XP from an administrative installation point, hosted on a file server and accessed through a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) or drive alias is not subject to this security issue.

For more information about how to install Office XP, visit the following Microsoft Web site and see the article in the Microsoft Office XP Resource Kit: