Microsoft Office 2007 button menu not dislaying

A quick Google search will show that a few people here and there report instances in which the Office Button (the icon at the top-left-hand corner of Office 2007 applications) menu won't display when you click on it. If you do some digging, it turns out that you can navigate the menu with keystrokes, even though it's not appearing. The problem, it turns out, is with remote control software. We ran into this, and it was puzzling, both the problem and the fact that there isn't much out there that is easy to find (hence this post). We were using an older VNC (TightVNC 1.3.8, to be specific, with which I'm not enamored, anyway). It's unclear to me under what circumstances this occurs (we have many servers running that version of TightVNC, without exhibiting this problem), but using RDP (MS Remote Desktop) does clear up the problem, as does installing RealVNC.

Setting up a VNC remote desktop in Enterprise Linux 4, 5, and 6

This is something that is terribly useful, and there are lots of how-to articles running around. Unfortunately, I've not found one that was quite complete, especially for someone who is only just getting familiar with Linux (which is precisely when you most need a GUI!). So this is a step-by-step instruction list on getting a remote X Windows session set up on enterprise linux 4, 5, and 6 (RHEL and CENTOS) that can be accessed with VNC viewer software (do a quick search on VNC if you're not familiar with it). In some set-ups, people create a VNCSERVER process that runs all the time. This does allow for persistent sessions (sessions that survive a disconnect), but it's not really what most of us need most of the time. What we're doing here is using xinetd, which will spin up Xvnc on an as-needed basis. Much cooler. Please note: vnc is not a secure protocol. What this means is that any traffic that VNC sends over the wire is *not* encrypted. Do make sure that your use of this doesn't put you at risk for having sensitive data (passwords, for instance) compromised.