Microsoft's first bug fix for Office 97--Service Release 1 (SR-1) was soundly ridiculed as buggy an inept. Even people at Microsoft referred to it as a "train wreck," vowing to not make the same mistake with SR-2, which was released last week. Well, it looks like SR-2 may suffer from some problems of its own: Bugnet.com, a Washington-based group of bug trackers, has issued an alert today that describes a number of problems in the new SR-2 release. The biggest bug causes the SR-2 install to fail if the user hasn't installed SR-1 yet. To be fair, Microsoft makes it pretty obvious that SR-1 needs to be installed first, but many people will receive the file from places other than the Microsoft Web site.
Microsoft has acknowledged that they've seen the alert, but says it is far too unspecific to respond to.
"The Bugnet report says there are issues but doesn't say much more," said Microsoft Office product manager John Duncan, noting that over 70,000 users have downloaded the hefty patch from the Microsoft Web site already. "Microsoft learned a lot from \[the mistakes in\] our last service release and is dedicated to making SR-2 as convenient and complete as possible.