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After reading through the newsgroups, a *lot* of people are experiencing bizarre problems after SP3. Some are running just fine. Many are surprised to discover they HAVE service pack 3, as it seems to have downloaded & installed itself automatically.
The biggest problems with Outlook have to do with sending/receiving mail (it won't), the IMAP interface breaking, inability to create new accounts, and failure of add-ons and 3rd party software that "violates" Microsoft's new security policy. Only a few users have these problems, and nobody appears to have all of them.
Office's document imaging is completely and universally hosed after SP3.
The most alarming trend is that some (not all users) report they are unable to open documents saved in prior versions of Office, unless those documents are placed in a special "Exception" folder (?) as defined by the Office Administration tools. Apparently, the new security model considers documents in pre-2003 format to be dangerous by default.
There is rabid speculation that it's is a ploy to force users to upgrade to 2007 (which does not do any of this) but if that were the case, you'd expect to see EVERY service pack 3 user ranting... I mean, who doesn't work with Office 97/2000/XP documents occasionally? Personally, I think it's a bug. A bug in a stupidly conceived security patch -- backwards compatibility is *critical* in a business environment.
And here's the bad news: you can't uninstall SP3. There's simply no option for it. The only way to get rid of it is to either (a) roll back to a restore point prior to SP3, or (b) uninstall/reinstall Office 2003 and stop short of SP3.
One newsgroup poster who did the reinstall got everything working again, then reported that the next day SP3 was back! Automatic updates had helpfully downloaded & reinstalled the update, complete with a system reboot.
Good luck, Carol. Hope you have a backup image you can use...
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