AssetMetrix Corp., an Ottawa-based company that offers PC asset management services to IT managers, said 22 percent of the 590,000 systems it analyzed last week are running Access as part of Office 2003 or Office XP installations that have yet to be updated with SP2 or Microsoft's patch, respectively.

That's more than two-thirds of the total number of PCs that AssetMetrix's research unit found with either Office 2003 or Office XP, the firm said. However, most of the machines analyzed by AssetMetrix had yet to be upgraded to the two latest releases of the application software: it said 68 percent of the systems were still running older versions of Office. The Office 2000 release had the largest share, at 40 percent.

Many companies installed Office 2000 along with Windows 2000 and have stuck with it ever since, said AssetMetrix CEO Jeff Campbell. "Everybody we've talked to [who uses Office 2000] says the darn thing works, so why replace it with something that potentially has more issues?"