Broken Word 2003 Shortcut for "Normal" View in Word 2007

At lunch today, I installed the Office 2007 release (obtained through my company's MSDN subscription), replacing my previous Office 2003 installation.

Per the online documentation and also a nice Jensen Harris (Microsoft) blog post, Office 2003 menu shortcut keys (e.g. Alt+F, S for File menu | Save) are supposed to work in Office 2007 as well.

When I fired up Word 2007 and opened a document, it put me in the "Print Layout" view. I'm accustomed to working in what was called "Normal" view in Word 2003, so I did Alt+V, N to try to switch to Normal view.

So far so good after the Alt+V -- Word 2007 even put up a nice little tooltip letting me know I had started typing a Word 2003 shortcut -- but subsequently pressing the N key had no effect.

I opened up the new "View" ribbon, and saw in the "Document Views" section that "Normal" was no longer present, but a new "Draft" view was available. I clicked that, and it put me in the equivalent of what "Normal" view was in Word 2003.

So "Normal" is apparently renamed to "Draft" in 2007... I switched back to "Print Layout" view (Alt+V, P did work), and then tried Alt+V, D to switch to "Draft" view -- it worked.

I fired up Word 2003 on my test machine to verify that Alt+V, D didn't work on that version. I expected it to have no effect... but Alt+V, D actually has a different function in Word 2003: hide/show the Document Map!

Consequently, the Alt+V, D shortcut for "hide/show Document Map" in Word 2003 is essentially broken in Word 2007 as well (since it now has a different function than before). I couldn't find any alternative "Alt+V" shortcut in Word 2007 for Document Map, although the "new" Alt+W (View ribbon), V, M shortcut does work for "hide/show Document Map" in Word 2007.

Fix: Firefox Downloads window does not appear

I recently had a problem where in Firefox, the Downloads window (the "Download Manager") wouldn't appear when I started to download a file. The Downloads window previously had been working fine.

The behavior I saw was that I would begin download of a file (typically something with a .zip extension), but the Downloads window would never appear, and I wouldn't get any notification that the download was in progress or that the download had finished.

I did verify that the "Show the Downloads window when downloading a file" checkbox in the Options dialog was checked. Checking and unchecking the checkbox and restarting Firefox didn't do the trick, either.

I also tried upgrading from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0, but the problem was still present after the upgrade.

A Google search didn't turn up any relevant information. On a suggestion from my brother Jeremy, I got more specific and searched the Mozilla Bugzilla database (the Firefox public bug-tracking system) for the issue, and came up with a similar issue, describing a problem where the Download Manager window did appear, but wouldn't show downloads in progress.

Ria Klaassen left a comment on that bug record with a suggestion to try deleting the downloads.rdf file in the Firefox profile folder, as it can sometimes get corrupted and cause problems.

I tried deleting my own downloads.rdf file and restarting Firefox, and the fix worked like a charm! My own Download Manager window is working perfectly once again. Thanks Ria!