Things I can and cannot get to work in Vista and Office 2007

I just upgraded my laptop running XP to Office 2007 and I’ve also started using my new desktop computer running Vista and Office 2007.

These are a few things that have bugged me and how I made them work (or not):

1) I could no longer run my macros in Outlook 2007.
Whenever I went in to Tools – Macro – Macros, selected my macro and hit run I would end up in the Visual Basic editor with an error message saying “The macros in this project are disabled. Please refer to the online help or documentation of the host application to determine how to enable macros.”
I went in to Tools – Macro – Macro Security and first changed from the default “Warnings for signed macros; all unsigned macros are disabled” to “Warnings for all macros” and finally to “No security check for macros” but I still could not get the macros to run.
In spite of a lot of Googling I found nothing. Then I realized I hadn’t tried trick no 1 in the book: Restart Outlook. And of course that was the solution. 😉
(Note to Microsoft: Please add a “Outlook needs to be restarted” message. Note to myself: Don’t be so stupid next time around)

A good thing in Outlook 2007 is that I no longer get the “A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook. Do you want to allow this? … Allow for x minutes”. I assume they have gotten rid of this annoying message and replaced with some security feature that does not require user intervention.

2) Desktop Search 3.0 had my hard drive indicator constantly lit up for 24 hours
After installing Office 2007 on my laptop I activated the built-in search functionality which requires me to download and install Windiows Desktop Search (WDS) 3.0.
After installing WDS my hard drive starts working overtime with the hard disk indicator constantly lit. Needless to say working with any programs is very slow or does not work at all.
I Googled the processes searchindexer.exe and searchprotocol.exe and get the advice to shut down the Windows Search service but it restarts after awhile. After trying various things I figure that maybe it just needs to finish indexing and almost 24 hours later the hard drive indiciator finally goes blank and my 85000+ documents (according to the WDS Indexing status window) are indexed.

So the problem was that 1) the indexing is slow, and 2) it takes up too much resources when you’re using the computer (in my case a Celeron laptop running XP with 1.5GB memory).

As I remember it, WDS 2 it only ran when you were not using the computer at all. WDS 3 runs all the time even though the Indexing status window says “Indexing speed is reduced while you use your computer”. There really should be more settings when you want WDS to run.

Big plus for WDS 3 though: It works! 🙂 At least this far. WDS 2 did not (see previous posts).

3) I cannot Copy and Paste files to/from Remote Desktop (RDC) when I’m running Vista
Copy and Paste of text works fine. My remote server is running Windows 2003. My guess is this has to do with some new fancy security setting in Vista but I have not yet found a solution. Any tips are greatly appreciated.
[Update: I got it working, and I think this is actually the way it works in XP too: You need to share a drive to make drag/drop or copy/paste of files work. When you start Remote Desktop, before you connect, click Options – Local Resources – More and then check Drives.]