Christina, thank you for posting! I'm doing some tech support for my dad
tonight (I like to think of it as return on investment for raising me : )  ),
and I was hitting wall after wall until I came across your post.

Here are the details of our situation. I apologize now for the length and
detail of the post, but I hope that if my documentation of my experience can
help someone else and some of these words trigger in a search engine, then my
scribing will have served its purpose.

He has Microsoft Windows Vista (I believe it is the OEM Home Premium
version) and uses Windows Mail as his e-mail client.

He created a document with Microsoft Word - I believe the version was Word
2003, but it may be 2000. I know it's more recent than Office 97, and not as
recent as Office 2007.

He sent it to me via Windows Mail as an attachment. I received it via my
gmail account. I opened it directly from gmail and immediately saved a copy
to my hard drive with a changed filename (he sent it to me for editing).

I edited the file in Word 2003, then sent it back to him via my gmail
account as an attachment. He sent me another e-mail stating he could not open
the document I returned.

I asked how Word behaved when he tried to open the attachments. He said it
did not produce any error messages; the working icon kept turning as if it
was trying to respond but it never does. Then he just closes out the e-mail.
He also noted this occurred with some other attachments, too, but did not
disclose the type of attachments.

To ensure we were not having problems with file name conventions, I renamed
the file to remove spaces, reattached the file with no spaces in the name to
a new e-mail, and waited for a response. He couldn't open that one, either.

I suggested that perhaps an update was pushed recently and that update may
be temporarily fouling up the works. He stated he did receive an update
yesterday (28 February 2008) and started having problems after that.

The updates he received are as follows:
Windows Vista KB940510
Windows Defender KB15597

And I assure you, my father's copy of Windows Vista is genuine. : )

As it is very late, my father has already retired for the evening. I
forwarded him the suggestion of temporarily disabling Windows Defender to
determine if this most recent Windows Defender update is the cause behind
this issue.

Should anyone concern themselves with this matter, I will post the results
when I discover them tomorrow.

Regards and good night.

Did you try to open that .pps file from within Windows Mail, or
did you save the attachment, and then double-clicked on the saved
file?

It sounds like that particular .pps document may have been corrupted.
If you have a known good .pps document on your computer, email it
to yourself. Will that open when received?

Windows Defender is not likely to have any effect on email attachments.

Hey rae did you try setting up windows photo gallery as one of the
options for openning it. go to control panel/ default programs and then
look for the file extension you want to open it will give you the option
select a program or browse for the one you want to use to open the
file.
try that and see if it works..

The note on the PPViewer download page does say "The following
Microsoft
PowerPoint features are not supported by this viewer:
Information Rights Management (IRM) presentations.
Running macros, programs, or opening linked or embedded objects. ", but
it
is stupid that Powerpoint viewer cannot do what Excel viewer and Word
Viewer
can.

"CHRISTINA" wrote: