Office XP SP1 Released

The first service pack for Office XP rolls up several previous patches and hotfixes and provides stability and performance improvements, particularly for Office XP running on Windows XP. Office XP Service Pack (SP)1 also includes some new features, but SP1’s most remarkable feature may be its stability.

So far, most errors with SP1 reported on newsgroups are either failures to get the update to run on certain OEM versions of Office XP or e-mail-related errors for MSN Internet Access subscribers. This contrasts with the first service packs for Office 97 and Office 2000, which were followed by a confusing parade of re-releases, patches for the patches, and other updates.

Plain Text E-Mail Blocks Worms

Most notable among the new features in SP1 is a “plain text” option for the Outlook e-mail program. This option renders all incoming e-mail as unformatted text, reducing the likelihood of success for hacking exploits that send HTML e-mail containing script. Images and other related files appear as attachments to the plain text message.