Microsoft Office 2008:Mac - Office did not install correctly

Come on.... it isn't even Monday. It's Friday for crying out loud.

What happened you ask? Well.....

I got an e-mail with a XLS file attached (I know.. shit happens). So I tried to open it, but I got a reminder that I hadn't (re)installed Office 2008 on my new iMac. But not to worry. I have the official Microsoft Office 2008 DMG (with matching serial number) on my Drobo, so the installation was done in a matter of minutes.

This is when it happened. Starting office resulted in this error: "Office did not install correctly". It even had a link to a Microsoft article explaining I needed an update. But the update wouldn't install since it was for OSX 10.4 (or something). Installing the latest update didn't solve it either.

Well, remove Office and reinstall it then... That didn't work either. Still the same error.

Searching the Interwebs resulted in a suggestion to remove everything Microsoft from the Mac.... And so I did. Especially the locations like:

/Library/Preferences/
~/Library/Preferences/

should be free of everything Microsoft. After trashing the Trash I reinstalled Office 2008. This time I was asked to enter my name and serial number. Something that didn't happen the first times. Then it occurred to me; I had copied my preferences (and other settings) when I migrated from my old to my new iMac. I guess that Microsoft doesn't support that.

It would have been nice if they had an option in the Removal Tool (which they generously supply) to remove EVERYTHING. I think that they didn't forget it. I think that this is by design. Just to screw with us Mac user.

The World Will End In Chaos

Microsoft Word 2007according to Microsoft lawyers. Dell, HP, and lots of other 'partners' would feel this in their wallets. Not to mention the consumer (who now can go and discover other means of writing a letter).

This is the responds to the court ruling that Microsoft offended a XML patent. The ruling states that Microsoft can't sell MS-Word in its current form, so that means MS Office without its flagship Word.

This case proves once again that software patents are killing business. Not that I favor Microsoft in this, but basically the software patents are nothing more than a (logical) way of solving problems (how to do this, how to do that, etc). In theory someone could have filed a patent on 'breathing' (a way to solve the possible problem of dying). But there's prior art on that one :).

Anyway, should the XML capable version of Word go away, you can always use OpenOffice to open those documents. In theory (!!!) that should work, but we all know about Microsoft and (open) standards.

Windows/Office Frustrations

The title should cover the topic appropriately.... The last couple of days there's this delay on opening Office documents on my work laptop. Every MS-Word or Excel document I open (by double clicking the document) takes approximately 25 to 30 seconds to open.

Using tools like procmon (formerly known as filemon from SysInternals) displayed nothing interesting. Apart from a 15 to 20 seconds delay between the WINWORD.EXE appearances in the logging.
Since this nagged the hell out of me, I tried some stuff (in a non-chronological order);

• Removed McAfee AV
• Removed all tooling I installed in the last couple of days
• Removed  MS-Word
• Removed Office 2003 completely
• Removing all references to Office, MS-Word or Excel in the registry, and on the filesystem.

Running Word with the /a switch or even typing winword.exe c:\test.doc works fine. Everything works, except the default opening of a file by double clicking it.

Someone suggested to add another user on the system and try it with that user account. So I did. I logged on as the new user and every document launched as it's supposed to do :-) . So I logged out, and tried the original user, and guess what? The document opened lightning fast. I couldn't be more happy, because I didn't feel like reinstalling the entire system.

After working a couple of hours I restarted the system (application update), and everything went back to 'normal'... Opening documents took forever again.....
It seems that launching Word from a FRESH user account resets something. Everything afterwards works fine, just as long as you don't reboot... And since it's Windows...... Well, Friday is gonna be a re-installment day. Am I looking forward to that (that's something of a rhetorical thing).