404 Tech Support

Ultra VNC and the invisible Office 2007 Office Button

When using VNC to remote control a machine with Office 2007 you may notice that the Office Button menu (top-left corner, main menu) does not display when using VNC. I gather this is because the menu is rendered with layered menus. If you click where the menu should be the machine responds properly, such as opening the ‘Save As…’ window, the ‘Open…’ window, etc. The menu displays on the local machine but does not get transferred remotely. If you install the UltraVNC hook driver, it works just fine.

You can download the driver here: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ultravnc/UltraVnc-DriverSetupSilent.zip?download

If installing this driver live, the VNC connection will be severed and the machine/service will need to be restarted.

Update: From reader Per’s comment, things have changed with UltraVNC 1.0.8.

There is a setting under “Admin Properties” on the server. It’s called “capture alpha-blending” and should be enabled.

To get to these settings, right-click on the System Tray icon and go to Admin Properties. Check the ‘Capture Alpha-Blending’ setting under Misc. and then hit Ok.