Win 7 "broke" my Excel Add in

I am surprised that this is happening as win7 uses virtualisation technology to specifically deal with this issue.

Can you let me know what the original location is and if possible the new location and I will see if it is a re-direction issue or maybe a protection issue. win7 by default provides far better protection to system areas, and if the add-in is pointing to a protected area this will need to be addressed

this is confusing Win7 includes a junction point for this very purpose pointing all requests for C:\Documents and Settings\USERXXX\Application Data.... to C:\Users\USERXXX\AppData\Roaming.... so this should work without modification.

What error message do you receive, or does the application just fail?

Assuming that the Add-on is located in the correct place then I can only assume that this is an issue with Windows 7

I have come across this partly related page from Microsoft, relating to %appdata%, the location we are dealing with here, which suggests that similar errors may be corrected by changing the Path environmental variable in XP.

Manually adding the full location to the "path" EV may get the spreadsheets to work without modification


Environment variable may not expand %APPDATA% to the Application folder

Ok I don't have office 2003, available to test here (which I am assuming you are running on Win7 as well as XP machines).

I have tested the %appdata% variable in win7 and using XPmode and they point to the correct locations relevant to the OS .

If you change the link address in excel to read "%appdata%\microsoft\AddIns" (plus the actual add-in detail if needed), the spreadsheet should be able to find the actual add in.

Additional testing produces the following in my system

Running a command prompt

Code:

c:\>cd C:\Documents and Settings\nigel\Application Data\Microsoft\AddIns

C:\Documents and Settings\nigel\Application Data\Microsoft\AddIns>dir
 Volume in drive C is W7 Pro x64
 Volume Serial Number is 04EE-D94A

 Directory of C:\Documents and Settings\nigel\Application Data\Microsoft\AddIns

22/08/2009  12:41    <DIR>          .
22/08/2009  12:41    <DIR>          ..
13/12/2009  18:52                 0 Test document in appdata roaming.TXT
               0 File(s)              0 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  40,010,432,512 bytes free

C:\Documents and Settings\nigel\Application Data\Microsoft\AddIns>

Which illustrates that the original path is valid in win7 and points to the new location as the test document shown is is the new addins folder