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From: mlbarrow@athena.mit.edu (Michael L Barrow)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: MS Word 4.0 & the WDEF virus
Keywords: virus
Message-ID: <1990Feb3.081030.28525@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 3 Feb 90 08:10:30 GMT
Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system)
Reply-To: mlbarrow@athena.mit.edu (Michael L Barrow)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 39

If you have a WDEF virus on your Mac and it starts to bother Word,
you'll definitely know it!  What usually happens is that you will run
into several unexplainable problems while doing "normal" Word
operations. Believe me, it took a while for me to realize that there
wasn't a problem with Word, but with a little gremblin somewhere in the System.

I shall briefly go over two cases of WDEF/MS Word conflicts that have
arisen here at the Institute:

1) A client was having a problem with fonts in Word. Basically, she
would type a sentence in the "Plain Text" format option and then she
typed the same sentence with underline on. Guess what? The sentence that
was underlined was shorter than its plain text counterpart.  Yes, they
were the same font family, size, etc.  The only thing different was that
one was underlined.

2) Another client used the MacProof DA along with Word and the Moire
screensaver. I initially thought that there was some conflict between
the DAs that resulted in  that most informative error message from the
Finder that "The application Word has unexpectedly quit" or even the
more informative "Sorry, a system error has occurred."

However, help was on the way. I gave a quick scan of their disks with
Disinfectant 1.5 and zapped the little buggers!  I then got the
Gatekeeper family & Eradicat'em installed. Both clients are now happy. 
I am still not sure of the extent of WDEF attacks. I originally heard
that it just made Desktop way too large, but judging from experience,
I'm betting that that's not the only thing it does.

Happy hunting!!!

*** By the way, I don't know of any other conflicts/attacks on other
packages.......yet. :-( ***


--Michael L Barrow
mlbarrow@athena.mit.edu
o MIT Information Systems/InfoServ-MCR Student Consultant
o Student Information Processing Board member