Visio shapes and stencils are missing or incomplete when you run Visio 2003 from a network server

When you run Microsoft Office Visio 2003 from a network server, shapes and stencils for your Visio drawings may be incomplete or missing.

To resolve this problem, configure the Indexing Service to access the network server where Visio is installed. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Log on as a user with administrator rights to the server where Visio is installed.
2. Open the Microsoft Management Console.
   
   To do this, click Start, right-click My Computer, and then click Manage.
3. Expand the Services and Applications node.
4. Expand the Indexing Service node.
5. Expand the Visio node.
6. Under Visio, click Directories.
7. In the right pane of the Computer Management console, double-click the entry for the folder on the server where Visio is installed.
8. Type your username and password when you are prompted, and then click OK.
   
   The username for a Microsoft Windows NT domain will be in the form of domain\username.
9. If the Indexing Service is running, right-click the Indexing Service node, and then click Stop.
   
   To start the Indexing Service, right-click the Indexing Service node, and then click Start.

Visio can be configured so that it resides and runs on a network server. With this feature, multiple users can run Visio without having to install Visio on their local hard drives.

The Shape Search feature in Visio can use the Microsoft Windows Indexing Service to improve search capability when it searches the stencils and shapes that are included with Visio. To do this, the Windows Indexing Service must be able to open the Visio stencils and to extract information to store in the index. The index is referred to as a catalog.

The Windows Indexing Service runs as a service on a computer that has Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows XP installed. The Indexing Service runs as a user that is named SYSTEM. When Visio is installed on a local hard disk, the SYSTEM user has access to all files on the drive.

However, if the stencils reside on a network server, the SYSTEM user will probably not be able to access the stencils because only users who have accounts on the Windows NT domain, or who otherwise have access to the server (or other networking systems such as Novell Netware) will have access. In this case, the Windows Indexing Service will not be able to index the Visio stencils and shapes, and searching will not work correctly if the Indexing Service is used.

The third-party products that this article discusses are manufactured by companies that are independent of Microsoft. Microsoft makes no warranty, implied or otherwise, regarding the performance or reliability of these products.