[idrawstuff]

Hi! I previously had Office XP installed via Group Policy on several workstations, and for various reasons outlined elsewhere on the site, I upgraded to Office 2003. At the time I upgraded, I didn't know anything about what a Group Policy was (our IT guy left the company some time back, and as of yet we haven't been able to replace him). So when shortcuts to Office XP kept reinstalling itself after every reboot, I tried various things to stop it before I learned (through this site, actually) about Group Policies and what actually went wrong.

The solution, by the way, was to disable the Group Policy and THEN upgrade to Office 2003.

We have eight workstations in the office, and two were used as guinea pigs. On the two test computers, I had done full uninstalls and reinstalls prior to finding my solution. On the rest, I upgraded from the original installs after disabling the group policy. When I was finished, I installed SP3 on all workstations.

On the six upgrades, every thing works fine. On the two that were done as full installs, Access 2003 has to reinstall itself every time I open the program up.

I did some research and found http://support.micro....com/kb/914830/ seemed to at least address the problem. It gives advice on how to manually change the registry:

To resolve this problem, manually change the registry on the computer where Access 2003 does not start as expected. To do this, follow these steps:
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel
3. In the right pane, right-click win32, and then click Modify.
4. In the Value data box, type the following, and then click OK:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\msaexp30.dll
Note This path is for the default location. If the Msaexp30.dll file is located on another drive or in another folder, use the path of the actual drive and folder.
5. Exit Registry Editor, and then start Access 2003.

However, on the two computers in which I did full installs, the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel" doesn't exist. It exists on all computers that the upgrade was done on (I imagine it has something to do with upgrading from a Group Policy, but I'm no expert), but that doesn't really matter because SP3 addressed those issues.

So my question, finally, is if anyone knows how I can fix this problem on my two guinea pigs? Is there a different place I can edit the registry? I have a Win32 file in a "...Engines/Sharepoint" folder, but so does the six upgrades.

Any thoughts?

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Any Access or Registry whizzes in the house?

[idrawstuff]

Any Access or Registry whizzes in the house?

[Ax238]

Hello idrawstuff,

I apologize for the delayed response. I would imagine there is a conflict with the installed Office program on the two machines in question. Please see the following for more information:
Using Group Policy to Deploy Office - Office 2003 Resource Kit - Microsoft Office Online

Most specifically, the issue you are dealing with is addressed in the Avoiding installation conflicts section.

Also see: How to bring an unmanaged installation of Office into a managed state

Regards,

Ax