OK, What do I do now?

[Ted Byers]

I have been having what appears to be a common problem. I installed Office
2000 on W2K using an administrator account, but when I try to run Office
applications from my other user account, the Windows installer starts up,
examines what's on the system and then complains about not finding a valid
source. If I press cancel on the installer's dialog box, it goes away and
the office program then starts without further trouble.

When I talked to a colleague aboput it, she said this is a common problem,
and that the solution is to install it for each user that may use the
workstation.

I tried her suggestion, but when I did, SETUP got as far as playing some
tune (the same one I get when I am booting), and then promptly dies. When
the dialog box appears asking which user I want to use to run SETUP, it
doesn't seem to matter which ID I use and in both cases SETUP dies
prematurely. So what do I do now?

Cheers,

Ted

 

[Jon]

Ted,

You might as well wish for the moon. No one from
microsoft or their "knowledgable" users ever responds to
this question.

Good luck

Jon

 

[Chad]

Good luck to you. I just submitted the same question. No
one seems to know.

Good luck. If you find something let me know. I will do
the same for you.

Chad

 

[Ted Byers]

Good luck to you. I just submitted the same question. No
one seems to know.

Good luck. If you find something let me know. I will do
the same for you.

Chad

Hi Guys,

Let's try not to be too pessimistic or cynical. Maybe one of the MVPs who
frequent this forum will investigate or even, if they have contacts within
MS, ask MS for an answer.

I will be meeting with the colleague I mentioned early next week, so if an
answer is not forthcoming before then in this forum, I was ask her. But it
wouldn't be fair to her to bother her right now because just over a week ago
she was called in by a client to resolve a network disaster. She found
enough problems to keep her busy for months (so she made up a series of
project plans detailing what they can do themselves and what she'd have to
do - ah the joys of fixing problems caused by charletans passing themselves
off as experts - her new client was badly served by his previous service
provided, to put it in diplomatic terms), so she won't have time to met with
me until next week.

Cheers,

Ted

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Hi, Ted,

See if this article helps at all:

312596 - OFF2000: Windows Installer Starts Each Time That a New User Starts
an Office Program:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;312596

It's a common setup problem in systems running Windows 95 and 98 with user
profiles enabled, and your friend's suggestion is spot on in those cases.
In general, W2K has been a little smarter about it.

Anyway, see if this helps--

 

[Ted Byers]

Hi, Ted,

Hi Susan,

Thanks.

See if this article helps at all:

312596 - OFF2000: Windows Installer Starts Each Time That a New User Starts
an Office Program:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;312596

It's a common setup problem in systems running Windows 95 and 98 with user
profiles enabled, and your friend's suggestion is spot on in those cases.
In general, W2K has been a little smarter about it.

Anyway, see if this helps--

Well, it did resolve that specific problem, but it caused others because the
method it uses trashes anything you already have in the users profile. Now
all the mail I had, and the newsgroups setting I had, appears to be gone. I
haven't checked the recycle bin yet, but IMO it ought to have shown how to
copy only the registry settings to the user encountering trouble rather than
simply trashing everything in the profile. This is going to be a royal pain
to fix because there were several applications I had installed as the user
that the Administrator did not need access to, and I suspect I will have to
reinstall them, and the Administrator had access to a program that the user
was not supposed to have access to. There should be a way to copy the
registry settings for office to any other user without trashing everything
else in the target profile. Why was nothing said about that?

Do you have any suggestions on fixing the problems this "fix" caused (I am
not annoyed with you, but rather with whoever wrote that article you pointed
out - whoever that was assumed that the machine would not be used before
that specific problem was solved and clearly in my case that assumption was
wrong)?

And to think this is because the installer for Office is not as smart as
that for Visual Studio! I can tell, I am going to end up spending still
more time fixing this.

Thanks again,

Ted

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Hi, Ted,

Well, even though you're not upset with me specifically, I'm still pretty
bummed. No, I don't know of any way to restore the user profile if it was
copied in this method, unless this article is of some help:

314045 - HOW TO: Restore a User Profile in Windows 2000:
https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314045

I don't know if the user profile copy would have created a backup of the old
one or not. I'll be interested to find out from you if it did.

What I *can* do is at least suggest to the KB folks that this article make a
recommendation that you back up existing profiles and registry keys first,
and a mention of the fact that this works best on a new profile.

Actually, the Installer is a Windows Installer, not an Office
Installer...I'm guessing the same one (maybe a later version) is used with
Visual Studio. It's interesting and frustrating that so much of its
functionality is seemingly out of the hands of the product groups.

Anyhow, sorry for that inconvenience to you--

 

[Ted Byers]

Hi Susan,

It is depressing when products don't work as advertised.

I can't access the page you indicate because I am not an MVP.

The user profile copy did not make a backup copy of the original profile.
Since I develop software for a living, I know this is almost trivial to
implement, having done it myself for the custom databases my applications
use. Always, I make backup copies of files my program edits, with the data
and time of the backup incorporated into the file name, so unless the user
deliberately goes into Windows Explorere and deletes the backups, he can
restore any database file to what he had at any time since he began to use
my program. Even MS Word makes a backup copy of a document be default any
time the document is edited. In any event, the profile is probably not
recoverable given that no backup copy was made (unless I am looking in the
wrong place).

Another think you might do is tell the KB folks that their strategy of
copying the Administrator profile also breaks Outlook Express when it is
started from the user's account. When in the Administrator account,
everything continues to work fine. However, every time I created a new
account, and then copied the administrator profile to it, Outlook Express
stopped working, and instead gave an error message about the address book
not loading, after which it promptly died. This is undoubtedly a
consequence of how Outlook and Outlook Express interact, and of relevant
settings in the registry, but I can't find the fix. Perhaps your KB friends
can find a solution.

Perhaps, to make things easy, you could just forward this to your KB
friends.

Anyway, your time and assistance is appreciated.

Cheers,

Ted

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Oops--sorry. I sent the wrong URL. It's not an "MVP" page...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314045

Great suggestions, and I'll pass them along.

S.

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Hi, Ted,

As promised, I've passed along to the channel I have (no guarantees, of
course <g>) that there's some missing information in the article.

Incidentially, had you thought about using Method 1 described in the
article?

 

[Ted Byers]

Thanks Susan,

I had, but it didn't seem logical, or the information was incomplete. You
see, I had the install disk in the CD drive, and I didn't see the logic in
treating a disk in that drive differently from another partition on one of
the physical drives (I have seven partitions distributed across two physical
drives. It didn't say where on a drive to put the copy, so I could not see
how it would make a difference, in this context, to have the install disk
data on the CD or on, say, drive i:, which is a partition on the second
drive, and never used to install anything. If it didn't say where the copy
should be placed on one of the hard disks, because that doesn't matter, why
would it matter if it is on a CD rather than on the hard disk. I am very
wary of "fixes" if I do not understand how or why it would work. This is an
old habit or inclination undoubtedly due to my experience as a software
developer. I never sign off on a bug fix being complete unless I understand
precisely why the bug existed and how the fix solves the problem. With the
kind of software I develop, a mistake can be costly in terms of human health
and even life; so I may behave a little like a perfectionist at times,
perhaps even a little anal (but only when relevant risks make it matter).

Thanks again,

Ted

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Sure; that makes sense.

My understanding of the logic around the benefit of that "fix" is that it
makes the installation source readily available so you don't have to hunt
for the CD, or keep it in the drive for those times that Office thinks it
needs the source files (handy if you support multiple machines and use one
installation CD).

It wouldn't matter where you copied the CD, as long as the Windows Installer
always has access to that drive.

Anyhow, good luck--hopefully I'll get a response to the suggestions for the
article(s).

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Just found out that the article content will be updated in the next couple
of weeks. Yay--