Worms and vti

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Guest

A subweb author in my organization had some FrontPage files mysteriously
converted to text gibberish with several references to "vti." This happened
when she uploaded to the server. Before, she could view & work with the pages
just fine on her computer. Afterward, the pages were destroyed both on the
server and on her machine. Even the photos she had saved with the pages
disappeared in both places.
Question: does her computer have a worm (and now the server)? We have AVG
antivirus installed.
 
All the files contained in folders named _vti_cnf and other _vti* folders
can be seen as "text gibberish". This includes those files with .htm, .gif
and .jpg extensions.

The contents of these _vti* folders are FrontPage meta data, and should
never be published between websites.

If FP is used to publish the site, these folders will never be uploaded -
they are recreated on the server if it has FrontPage extensions, if an FTP
client is used, there is no need to upload these folders, and using FTP is
likely to corrupt the meta data on the server if the server is FP extended.
 
Thank you, Ron. She said she had copied dynamic web templates off the website
to her computer (contrary to instructions), so maybe she had vti files, too.
Or maybe she dragged & dropped into a vti folder. Who knows.
Anyway, can anything be undone? Yes, we have FP extensions. Can we protect
the rest of the website on the server? It all looks OK now.
Meanwhile, I'll tell her to quit uploading until our server administrator
gets back Tuesday. Thanks again for your timely reply. It's nice to know we
probably don't have a worm. -- Mir
 
If your colleague is only publishing to a subweb, the rest of the web
should be unaffected - FP treats subwebs as independent websites.
I think the affected subweb may have to be deleted, then rebuilt.

If your colleague used FrontPage to File->import the DWTs, dragged/dropped
using FrontPage and not Explorer, FP would manage the _vti* folder issue.
 
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