'Newstar111' and Dian -
I think I know what he's talking about - I have the same problem
periodically. I work in an enterprise environment, and installations of
Office are done one of two ways: either by CD (rare now), or by MSI/MST
packages from our software server.
I've had the same thing happen with both types of installations on XP Pro
(SP1 and SP2) machines, and haven't found a common thread yet. On the
majority, the software will install in about 7 minutes or less. Then, the
other 15% of the time, the PITA one will hit.
Office starts out fine, allows the selection of options to be installed, and
starts to copy/install the files. The progress/status bar will get about
20-25% done, then hit the wall and creep along - barely showing any progress.
The hard drive activity light will blink every four seconds or so - not
writing much to the hard drive.
Installations such as this have taken overnight to finish - on an
installation of Office Pro (Access, PowerPoint, Word, Excel) as a full 'on
computer' installation. Aggravating, to say the least.
The only way I've found to get around this is to clear the paging file,
change the size of it (increase it at least 50%), then install the Office
package again. You MUST first select 'no paging file', set it, shut down and
cold boot it. Reset the paging file to 50% larger than it was originally,
and cold boot again. Now try to install Office - it should fly through it in
less than 7 minutes.
This occurs on systems that are Dell and Fujitsu systems (desktop and
laptop) 1.7GHz P-4's and higher with either 512MB of RAM or 1GB of RAM.
Again, no rhyme or reason to the setups; we use identical desktop systems,
and it will only pull this "stunt" about 15% of the time. We're using VLA
licensed software, if that makes any difference.
If anyone can shine a light on this, I'd be most appreciative - I've
searched TechNet, the KB and Googled the devil out of it - still can't find
anything.
C. Bowser - MCDST
