Some Sage Advice

 A number of users are reporting incredibly slow launch times (up to several minutes) for Office 2008 applications under Mac OS X 10.5.2. Some MacFixIt readers report that Apple and Microsoft have both identified this as a known issue.

For some users, the following fix has proven mildly successful: In Word, turn off WYSIWYG fonts and “Show Project Gallery at Startup” in (go the “Word” menu, then Preferences > General). Quit any Office apps. Next delete the files:

• HOME/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/Normal.dotm
• HOME/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist
• HOME/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008

and restart.

Apple is aware of the problem and they claim there is a conflict with Office 2008 and Leopard 10.5.2. No word on when a fix will be available.

This is a little off-topic but it is important enough that I need to share it with you. A close friend of my wife had sort of disappeared for a while so she was surprised when her friend called out of the blue. She asked where she had been and she explained that she had spent the past several weeks on the phone everyday trying to get her life back—she had been the victim of identity theft.

The thieves had done a great job. They had ordered credit cards in her name, somehow convinced Verizon to transfer her phone calls to a house in New Jersey, and had racked up $30,000 in credit card bills in a short amount of time.

This phone call came coincidentally the same day I had called my insurance agent and asked her about my identity theft protection. I had purchased it last year as part of my “golden blanket” protection from Nationwide. For $45/year, I was covered. However, the coverage would only help me straighten out my credit. If someone hacked into my bank account, that money would be lost.

So, I immediately signed up for LifeLock. Lifelock is a service that not only monitors your credit, but they will cover you for up to $1,000,000 in damages and they will hire the best people they can find to straighten out your credit and to get your identity back. For $10/month or $99/year, you are covered. They are so sure of their service, that the CEO of the company has posted his own social security on their website. If you are concerned about this very serious issue, I would urge you to take a look.

Kirsten Harris, a Product Support manager at Adobe Systems, recently issued the following statement regarding an issue with Photoshop that affects the crop tool and others, indicating that a fix for this issue will appear in a upcoming release of Leopard:

“Adobe and Apple are working closely to provide a fix to a known issue running Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended on Mac OS X Leopard (v10.5.1). Currently, when you enter values in numerical fields to set sizes for the brush, crop, marquee, lasso, type, and other Photoshop CS3 tools, those values revert to previously entered values when you try to apply them.

“While we have identified workarounds for some of the affected tools, this issue prevents people from working as precisely and intuitively as they expect. Providing a fix to customers is a top priority. Please note the following: The fix will be provided through an update to Mac OS X Leopard. Consequently, it is not part of the Photoshop CS3 (10.0.1) update.”

“Apple is collaborating closely with us to get this fix incorporated into a Mac OS X Leopard update. No public schedule is available at this time, but both companies understand the urgency of this fix. As soon as the appropriate update to Mac OS X Leopard is available, we will immediately alert our Photoshop users.”

Adobe’s current workarounds are as follows:

• “Workaround for tools with sliders: Instead of typing in a number, use the sliders to change the value.”
• “Workaround for tools with pop-up menus: Enter a value for the size but don’t press Return/Enter to apply the value. Instead, choose it from the top of the Size pop-up menu to commit it.”
• “Workaround for tools which do not have sliders or pop-up menus: For certain tools, such as the Line tool, you may want to set up presets that you can load to set common sizes. Alternatively, you can restart Photoshop CS3 to clear the problem. You will then be able to enter values again. However, the issue typically re-surfaces quickly. “