[SOLVED] Word 2003: Red X in place of embedded images

[dr_insanity]

Okay, this one is really getting to me now!
Running office 2k3 in a networked environment. Have recently upgraded some machines from win2k, office2k to winxp, office2k3.

Here's the issue, when the user opens a document with embedded images, they appear as the little red X. On their old computers they could open the files and the images would appear no problems, and an administrator account on the new machines can open the file with the images appearing fine. linked images also appear with no problems. The users have roaming profiles and so their settings will be transferred between machines.

This leads me to believe that the issue is either because of a local account setting, or permissions on a folder. I have tried upgrading service packs etc, I have done a word detect and repair as the user, I have tried using the word recovery template to reset the registry key and other settings. none of these have worked.

The only solution that brings the images up is blowing out the entire roaming profile, I don't really want to do this as there are obviously a lot of other settings in there which would need to be recovered. I tried purging just the office components of the roaming profile from within application settings and still this didn't work, only when ntuser.dat was removed (thus purging the entire profile) did the images appear.

any ideas what might be causing this and what the solution would be?

[dr_insanity]

Okay, fixed it now:

Have discovered that the problem is indeed profile related. Roaming profiles which have been generated elsewhere (other than the machine itself) use shell folders in the temporary internet files folder, to which users do not have permission. Where the temp folder for IE is moved to e:\temp the problem was not apparent.
To fix, replace the shell folder registry keys:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\Shell Folders with Cache = "e:\temp\user" and
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\User Shell Folders with Cache = “e:\temp\user”

Where the user has full modify privileges on E-drive. This solves the problem so that images now appear correctly.