Can’t move or edit web parts in edit mode on a wss 3.0 page

More ancient history here! (Did I mention my customer had 2007, 2010, and 2013 farms?)

One of our users found that when she put a wss 3.0 page in edit mode, moved a web part, and clicked Exit Edit Mode, she got them infamous “Unexpected Error” page. I gave it a try myself and, boom, same thing. So I decided to try editing one of the web parts. No luck. “Unexpected Error” page. I was about to open up the manage web parts page using the URL: http://yourdomain/_layouts/1033/spcontnt.aspx?url=default.aspx when I thought, maybe FireFox will work!

It’s an old trick to use FireFox when things go bonkers in IE. FireFox limits what you can do but is a bit more forgiving of syntax.

So I loaded up FireFox and loaded up the page. Couldn’t move the web parts but could finally edit them. There were a few Content Editor web parts on the page so I started to look at the content of each. Low and behold, there was a bunch of <div> tags in the content on one web part along with some GUIDs and such. Apparently, the customer had copied and pasted the code from a page and the <div> tags along with it. Stripping those out fixed the issue and all was well in WSS land!

The moral of the story: when in doubt, try it in FireFox!

Office documents not showing the “Enable for Editing” button

Dust off the brain cells boys and girls, here is a blast from the past. I have a client who is running WSS 3.0 (remember that one?) along with Office 2007. After some mysterious patch push that nobody will admit to, any office documents that are opened from the WSS farm do not display the Read Only or Edit dialog box. Oh, and this is on Windows XP! Of course, we tried to replicate the problem but no luck since we are on Windows 7 and Office 2010. Don’t you just love the bleeding edge? Gag! Since everything worked for me, this pointed directly to a client issue.

After taking the Way Back Machine into the stone age, I found the solution. Of course it makes no sense but here it is anyway.

Open up Control Panel in XP and select Programs and Features.

Go to the Office installation and click Change.

Then find the SharePoint Support features.

Remove the feature.

Get out of everything and reboot the computer.

Go back to Control Panel, Office, etc. and add the SharePoint feature as Run from my computer.

Get out and reboot again.

Go back to Control Panel and run a Repair on the Office installation.

That should fix it.