Sunday, May 28, 2006
Office 2007 Beta 2: 2nd try's the charm
OK, so I got my computer to boot and show its desktop again.
Now I needed to find MAINSP2op.MSP so I can have a working (or uninstallable) Office 2003. My work had the Office SP2 "FullFile" available so I downloaded that and extracted it. It had MAINSP2ff.MSP instead, so Windows Installer balked when I tried launching Outlook and pointing it at that file. Oh well. I downloaded just the Client version and extracted, noting that it contained MAINSP2op.MSP as I'd been looking for. Then I had to download about six or seven more updates, extract the MSP files, and point to them, but Outlook eventually loaded. Word, too, seemed to be working just fine. Now that my system seemed to be back in action, it was time to cripple it again...
I decided that maybe Office 2007 was confused by IE 7 and that my problem with IE 6 after installation was just a fluke. I checked MS's site and found that IE 6 was a requirement for Outlook 2007. So I just installed Office 2007 again, without doing anything to IE. I created a restore point first :)
I also noticed that my restore point had reinstalled Google Desktop Search. So I uninstalled it (and had no problems this time, curious). This still left me with not enough room, so I cleaned up the temp directory.
When installing Office 2007, I chose to "Customize" rather than just Upgrade. My options were:
Remove all previous versions
Install InfoPath and Publisher on first use (which may be never)
Everything else at default
Upon completion, I rebooted. I happily noted that my desktop came up this time. I was even happier to find that IE 6 still worked. So I launched Outlook. Other than it coming up with the title bar "Inbox - <0w> - Microsoft Outlook", nothing was too weird. I also noticed that, this time, Outlook didn't crash on the way out. So far, so good.
Launched Word. I am typing in it now so it’s clearly working. So far the only thing that hasn’t worked has been Autocorrect Options (nothing happens when I press the button; I wanted to turn off smart quotes etc. so as not to put non-legit character codes in my documents / blog posts). I tried to attach an image to see if Flickr can be used for image storage, but it cannot. That’s too bad.
OK. Since I’m a glutton for punishment, I’m now going for the real reason I did all this: OneNote 2007. Wish me luck.
