FWIW it seems that it is acutally the restricted privileges of the ASPNET 
user rather than the fact it is running in the background.

I have tried with a windows service running as LocalSystem and it works OK; 
when the service runs as LocalService it fails.

Andy


"Andy Fish" <ajfish@b...> wrote in message 
news:%23cyH33w1EHA.2568@T......
> Hi,
>
> I am writing a server based app that will manipulate WordProcessingML 
> files. At the end of the process, I need to convert the XML back to a .doc 
> file to send back to the user (in case he hasn't got office 2003), so I 
> run up word using COM, load the document, and do a 'save as' to convert to 
> .doc format. I'm using the office 11 interop assemblies to do this from an 
> asp.net web application.
>
> This works fine unless the document contains images, in which case they 
> just appear as empty placeholders in the .doc file (or, in the case of a 
> photo editor image, word refuses to open the document).
>
> Howeve, exactly the same code runs fine when running in the foreground, 
> it's only when I run it in asp.net that I get this problem. It also works 
> fine when loading a .doc file with images in; it only goes wrong when all 
> of the following are true:
>
> - running in background (asp.net)
> - opening a WordML document
> - document contains images
>
> I guess it's trying to use some GDI functions to convert the images and 
> this doesn't work when it's running as a service. It seems crazy that it's 
> happy to convert the other way though.
>
> Anyone have any ideas on what might be going wrong or possible 
> workarounds?. currently the only idea I can think of is having word 
> running on the desktop on the server with a macro that watches a directory 
> and does the conversions - not very nice at all!!
>
> Please don't tell me I shouldn't run word as a service - unless you can 
> tell me another way to convert between WordMl and .doc format :-)
>
> Andy
>
>