maniacmartin

I have discovered a most annoying bug with Microsoft Publisher 2000’s BorderArt feature.

It all started when I was making a poster for dad on his Windows XP PC, using his version of Publisher 2000, the Office afterthought desktop publishing application. All of a sudden, dad’s PC rebooted instantly. That is to say it went straight from working to BIOS, with no errors and no visible shutdown sequence. Thinking it was probably a rural power blip, I just reloaded Publisher and remade the poster I had lost. However, by the third instant reboot, I began to see a pattern emerge, and tested it a final time to get some proof.

Dad has virtually all Office settings on the default for Office 2000 Small Business Edition, and rarely ventures outside of Thunderbird, Firefox, Word and Publisher. He never even got round to working out what Excel does. In Publisher, If you make a rectangle shape, then click Format, Line/Border Style, More Styles…, a dialog box will appear.

In the BorderArt tab, you can select one of many tacky picture borders for your rectangle.

Except on dad’s PC, once you scroll about two-thirds of the way down the list of possible BorderArt types, the PC will instantly reboot as if you’ve hit the reset button. No errors, no blue screen of death (thanks to SP2 suppressing one maybe), nothing.

Unfortunately I cannot do more extensive testing because the reboots are very annoying, and because I don’t have a pile of Windows boxes around to test on. However, I would be very interested to hear if this has happened to anybody else, and into any insights and possible fixes would be much appreciated.