moving home directory broke environment (OSX)

[otto]

I moved my home directory to a new partition and created a /Users link
to the new location. All apps have taken this fine with the exception of
MS Office. I have removed every instance of Office's preferences from
wherever I can find them but I'm still not getting reliable results, most
notably my font and graphics support.

What kind of environment settings are saved by Office and where? How
can I reset them to 'null' as if I were a brand new user?

In fact, I did create a brand new test user and ran Office successfully.
So, it's my personal settings that are still at odds here.

Any information will be appreciated.

-otto

 

[Barry Wainwright]

The MUD folder needs to be found in the system user's documents folder.

If you have replaced the entire user folder with a symlink to a new
location, I can see no reason why that wouldn't work. It certainly works
perfectly well to replace the MUD folder and the Documents folder with
symlinks. Aliases created in the finder work fine for the MUD folder as
well, but can be a bit flaky on the Documents folder.

Remove the links, restore everything to factory default and check it's
working properly there again, then try to build the links again.

What are you using to make the links? Un*x command line, or some GUI tool?

--
Barry Wainwright
Microsoft MVP
<http://support.microsoft.com/


I moved my home directory to a new partition and created a /Users link
to the new location. All apps have taken this fine with the exception of
MS Office. I have removed every instance of Office's preferences from
wherever I can find them but I'm still not getting reliable results, most
notably my font and graphics support.

What kind of environment settings are saved by Office and where? How
can I reset them to 'null' as if I were a brand new user?

In fact, I did create a brand new test user and ran Office successfully.
So, it's my personal settings that are still at odds here.

Any information will be appreciated.

-otto

 

[otto]

I have used the plain old "ln -s" to create the link. Now it looks like
this:
/Users now points to /Volumes/Users
as mentioned, all other apps are working with this change but Office,
mainly Word. What I have noticed is that Word has problems loading/
managing fonts. The Font tab takes unusually long time to show
anything and what it shows is a blank screen!!

I have noticed that Excel also has problems displaying pages correctly.

Is there anything OSX specific command line that I can use to show
environment parameters? OpenStep used to have the dwrite and dread
commands and I know OSX has something equivalent but cannot find
any reference. I'm suspecting that this data needs to be removed to fix
this problem.

Thanks for your attention.

-otto

 

[otto]

This concludes my series of postings with a happy ending. Perhaps this
will help someone with identical requirements to mine.

Moving users home directories is a rather mundane task while
maintaing multi-user environments. Something in this process is not
quite compatible with Office X. The use of links in a Un*x environment
makes such a task totally manageable but have to be used with caution
in this instance.

Besides removing all preferences made by all Office X related
applications, it was also necessary to remove all font cache instances in
~/Library/Fonts for the problem to be completely resolved. Something
is saved in that cache that makes it absolutely necessary to 'check'
correct or it would not work at all.

Even though /Users is a link to /Volumes/Users and is transparent to a
Un*x based OS, this set of applications finds it distinct enough to cause
conflicts. Beware!

-otto

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Hi,

Moving users home directories is a rather mundane task while
maintaing multi-user environments. Something in this process is not
quite compatible with Office X. The use of links in a Un*x environment
makes such a task totally manageable but have to be used with caution
in this instance.

Yep. The Carbon Registration Database file gets srewed up and looses
track of the different components Office uses.
You then loose communication between apps (OLE links) and VBA. You can
get them (temporarely) back by quitting all Office apps, and deleting
the CRD.

Besides removing all preferences made by all Office X related
applications, it was also necessary to remove all font cache instances in
~/Library/Fonts for the problem to be completely resolved. Something
is saved in that cache that makes it absolutely necessary to 'check'
correct or it would not work at all.

Even though /Users is a link to /Volumes/Users and is transparent to a
Un*x based OS, this set of applications finds it distinct enough to cause
conflicts. Beware!

You would be much better of using the NetInfo Manager instead (or in
addition) to symlinking this folder.
You have to set it up for all users, but some applications seem to like
this better.

Corentin