Does MS Office install preserve data in existing MUD folder?

[rbfraven]

1) I am running Office 2004 on a 500Mhz G4 PB with 10.4.10. I want to
un-install Office and then re-install it to see if it resolves a
problem. I use Entourage calendar and want to be sure I retain that
and other data in the database file "Office 2004 Identities/Main
Identity/Database" in the MUD folder. That data was retained when I
upgraded from the previous office version, but uninstalling and re-
installing is a bit different.

2) When I re-install, can I re-use the original product key or must I
use one of the other two?

Thanks

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Before responding to your questions--what is the problem you are trying
to solve? Remove and Reinstall is not usually the answer to
problems--there are many things to try before that and a good diagnostic
trick is to see if the problem exists in a different user account. If
you state the problem, someone may know a different answer.

1) The key folder is the Main Identity folder--*not* just the database
within it, the whole folder (I'm pretty sure, anyhow). The Remove Office
tool should not touch anything in MUD, but it's a good idea to save a
copy to external media anyhow, or even rename a copy and hide it
elsewhere on the harddrive. After the reinstall, be sure to update, as
Entourage 11.0 will not recognize an identity created by Entourage 11.3.
Once updated, however, your MUD folder should still be there and it
should all just work smoothly. But if you use other Office programs, you
may have created other customizations that Remove Office will wipe. See
here before doing anything--
http://entourage.mvps.org/install/remove_office.html
http://entourage.mvps.org/path/index.html

2) You can re-use the original product key--three license numbers allow
simultaneous use on three networked computers, but re-installing on the
same computer or a replacement computer is unlimited.

 

[rbfraven]

Before responding to your questions--what is the problem you are trying
to solve? Remove and Reinstall is not usually the answer to
problems--there are many things to try before that and a good diagnostic
trick is to see if the problem exists in a different user account. If
you state the problem, someone may know a different answer.

1) The key folder is the Main Identity folder--*not* just the database
within it, the whole folder (I'm pretty sure, anyhow). The Remove Office
tool should not touch anything in MUD, but it's a good idea to save a
copy to external media anyhow, or even rename a copy and hide it
elsewhere on the harddrive. After the reinstall, be sure to update, as
Entourage 11.0 will not recognize an identity created by Entourage 11.3.
Once updated, however, your MUD folder should still be there and it
should all just work smoothly. But if you use other Office programs, you
may have created other customizations that Remove Office will wipe. See
here before doing anything--http://entourage.mvps.org/install/remove_office.htmlhttp://entourage.mvps.org/path/index.html

2) You can re-use the original product key--three license numbers allow
simultaneous use on three networked computers, but re-installing on the
same computer or a replacement computer is unlimited.

The problem I was referring to is that Word 2004 on my machine takes
50% CPU even when no file is open. The computer heats up which causes
the fan to come on. The problem occurred after updating to 10.4.10 and
Office update 11.3.6. This is the only app with this problem. See the
following thread for details:
http://groups.google.com/group/micr...e.word/browse_thread/thread/ea26d2fd0314d124#
.. I thought that maybe there is a chance that re-installing Word
might fix the problem although someone with the same problem tried re-
installing but it didn't fix the problem. Thanks for your answers to
my questions.

 

[John McGhie]

Just to underline what Daiya said:

* Reinstalling almost NEVER fixes a problem on the Mac, because the parts
of the software that are reinstalled are not the parts that get damaged.

* Daiya's advice in the troubleshooting section is more likely to nail the
problem. If Word goes off its head, it's either a) The normal template, b)
Preferences, or c) Misapplied updates.

Delete the template and your preferences, and re-apply the latest Combo
updates from both Apple and Microsoft, before you even think of doing a
"Remove and Replace".

BTW: A straight "Reinstall" does nothing at all: files that already exist
on the hard disk will not be replaced, so nothing changes. You must run the
Office Remover tool to perform a useful re-install.

Hope this helps

The problem I was referring to is that Word 2004 on my machine takes
50% CPU even when no file is open. The computer heats up which causes
the fan to come on. The problem occurred after updating to 10.4.10 and
Office update 11.3.6. This is the only app with this problem. See the
following thread for details:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.word/browse_thread/
thread/ea26d2fd0314d124#
. I thought that maybe there is a chance that re-installing Word

might fix the problem although someone with the same problem tried re-
installing but it didn't fix the problem. Thanks for your answers to
my questions.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Auckland, New Zealand
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[rbfraven]

Just to underline what Daiya said:

* Reinstalling almost NEVER fixes a problem on the Mac, because the parts
of the software that are reinstalled are not the parts that get damaged.

* Daiya's advice in the troubleshooting section is more likely to nail the
problem. If Word goes off its head, it's either a) The normal template, b)
Preferences, or c) Misapplied updates.

Delete the template and your preferences, and re-apply the latest Combo
updates from both Apple and Microsoft, before you even think of doing a
"Remove and Replace".

BTW: A straight "Reinstall" does nothing at all: files that already exist
on the hard disk will not be replaced, so nothing changes. You must run the
Office Remover tool to perform a useful re-install.

Hope this helps





--
Don't wait for your answer, click here:http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltdhttp://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Auckland, New Zealand
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

As I mentioned in the referenced thread, I did try the solutions you
recommended plus others including re-installing 10.4.10 in the combo
update form and re-installing the Office update 11.3.6. Everything I
have tried has not worked. The original poster to the thread
discovered that if he opens a window like ABOUT WORD, the CPU drops
way down. I really don't expect that re-installing Office will fix the
problem but I was wondering if it was worth a try. The only clean
install I ever did was in 2001 when I installed the first version of
10.1., so I wouldn't be surprised if that is what is required to fix
this. However, that is too much work right now, so I will probably
wait until I buy a MBP with Leopard to replace my aging G4 PB (at
which time I will have to effectively do a clean install). Thanks for
your suggestions.

Bob Fowles

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Bob:

I don't think that a clean install is "likely" to fix this problem.

I suspect the most likely fix would be to delete all of the Word
preferences.

Have a look here for the section on Damaged Preferences: that's what I think
it is...

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/TroubleshootingIndex.html

Cheers

As I mentioned in the referenced thread, I did try the solutions you
recommended plus others including re-installing 10.4.10 in the combo
update form and re-installing the Office update 11.3.6. Everything I
have tried has not worked. The original poster to the thread
discovered that if he opens a window like ABOUT WORD, the CPU drops
way down. I really don't expect that re-installing Office will fix the
problem but I was wondering if it was worth a try. The only clean
install I ever did was in 2001 when I installed the first version of
10.1., so I wouldn't be surprised if that is what is required to fix
this. However, that is too much work right now, so I will probably
wait until I buy a MBP with Leopard to replace my aging G4 PB (at
which time I will have to effectively do a clean install). Thanks for
your suggestions.

Bob Fowles

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Auckland, New Zealand
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[rbfraven]

John,

Yes, I tried all of that including other items in Troubleshooting and
various other things that I noticed in the related forums in the past
few months. This affects all accounts on my machine including my test
account. It only affects Word and it occurred very soon after I
installed 10.4.10, QT 7.2, and Office 11.3.6. That was back in early
July. I've read a lot of Word, Office, and Apple forum articles since
then. I think I'm down to removing/re-installing Office 2004 and
Archive/Install 10.4. One guy went back to 10.4.9 to solve his Word
CPU problem. My reason for posting here was to make sure I won't lose
any calendar data if I do an Office remove/re-install.

Thanks for your suggestions,

Bob Fowles

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Bob:

OK:

1) A Remove and Re-Install should leave the content of your MUD untouched.
But I would not trust it, myself, I would copy the MUD to a different
location.

* Do not re-name the MUD or anything in it before you re-install, or you
will get new blank accounts set up; you don't want that.

* You must re-apply all the updates before you attempt to open Entourage.
If it is not updated, Entourage can't open the latest MUD format.

2) You can re-use your product key an unlimited number of times on the same
machine.

Cheers

John,

Yes, I tried all of that including other items in Troubleshooting and
various other things that I noticed in the related forums in the past
few months. This affects all accounts on my machine including my test
account. It only affects Word and it occurred very soon after I
installed 10.4.10, QT 7.2, and Office 11.3.6. That was back in early
July. I've read a lot of Word, Office, and Apple forum articles since
then. I think I'm down to removing/re-installing Office 2004 and
Archive/Install 10.4. One guy went back to 10.4.9 to solve his Word
CPU problem. My reason for posting here was to make sure I won't lose
any calendar data if I do an Office remove/re-install.

Thanks for your suggestions,

Bob Fowles

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Auckland, New Zealand
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[Diane]

Yes, I tried all of that including other items in Troubleshooting and
various other things that I noticed in the related forums in the past
few months. This affects all accounts on my machine including my test
account. It only affects Word and it occurred very soon after I
installed 10.4.10, QT 7.2, and Office 11.3.6. That was back in early
July. I've read a lot of Word, Office, and Apple forum articles since
then. I think I'm down to removing/re-installing Office 2004 and
Archive/Install 10.4. One guy went back to 10.4.9 to solve his Word
CPU problem. My reason for posting here was to make sure I won't lose
any calendar data if I do an Office remove/re-install.

Thanks for your suggestions,

The problems from the QT updates also involve the need to do prebinding. If
you've tried these steps and they did not help:

Download the 10.4.10 combo update for your computer
Reboot/login using Safe Mode
Run Repair Permissions
Install the OS Combo Updater
Reboot

See Apple KB 30604: <http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306043>

One user set out these steps to finally fix their problem:

Login as an administrator
Launch the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities)
Type cd /Library/Receipts/JavaSE6Release1.pkg/Contents and press return
Type lsbom -s -f Archive.bom > /tmp/files and press return (this will create
a file in the /tmp directory named files that lists all of the contents of
JavaSE6Release1.pkg)

Using your favorite text editor, open the file /tmp/files. Typing open
/tmp/files then pressing return will open the file with TextEdit, by
default. If you were using BBEdit, you could type BBedit open /tmp/files.
Replace all blank spaces, " " (type one space in the "find" field), with
(type a single backslash with a single space after it in the replace field)
and all entries of "./" with "rm /". If you opened the file in TextEdit,
choose "Find" from the "Edit" menu, and make these replacements. Essentially
you are generating a command list that will delete all the files installed
by JavaSE6Release1.pkg.

Back in the Terminal, type sudo bash /tmp/files and press return
Next type rm -r /Library/receipts/JavaSE6Release1.pkg and press return.
Finally, update prebinding by typing sudo update_prebinding. When prompted
for a password, enter your admin password, and press Return again. The
process may take a few minutes, and you may see various messages flash by.
The process is complete when the Terminal returns to a normal prompt. Do not
perform any other operations while the update prebinding process is taking
place.


If none of these fix the issue, the best thing to do is a archive install of
the OS.

 

[rbfraven]

Diane,

Actually 306043 is specifically for Intel machines. Mine is a 2001
Titanium 500Mhz G4 Powerbook. Even though that prescription is for
Intel, I had tried it and the prebinding after reading about it many
weeks ago. Re: the suggestion to delete all the files installed by
JavaSE6Release1.pkg, that may be for a Intel machine. My latest Java
pkg file in /Library is JavaForMacOSX10.4Release5.pkg.

Thanks for the suggestions.
Bob Fowles

 

[rbfraven]

I solved my "Word 2004 Excessive CPU Problem" with the help of
http://groups.google.com/group/micr...250f?lnk=gst&q=renaud&rnum=2#cc8809032f4c250f
and especially the blog http://mactip.blogspot.com/2007/07/dependent-dylib-is-not-prebound.html
which it references. I had previously run update_prebinding but failed
to notice an error message. Apparently that error prevented
update_prebinding (UP) from completing (see link). UP uses the data
file /var/db/dyld/update-prebinding-paths.txt which is a list of files
to be operated on. By using -debug on UP you can see exactly where UP
stops. In my case it was failing on a group of files in /usr/X11R6/lib
and not doing any after those. I made a copy of the file and with
emacs edited those lines by inserting "#" at the beginning to comment
out those filenames. After re-running UP, MS Word now uses less than
3% which is quite a reduction from the 50% it was using. My thanks to
Renaud Blanch (1st link above), the blog author (2nd link above) and
anyone else who responded to my earlier posts about this problem.

I'm grateful to have this solved after 2.5 months but several
questions remain including (1) Which update 10.4.10, QT 7.2 or MS
Office 11.3.6 caused the problem?, (2) How does this file get updated,
and (3) Why was it in error?

Bob Fowles

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Bob:

The original problem was the QuickTime 7.2 update. On a small number of
systems that were seemingly afflicted at random, it hosed the prebinding.

It ran just fine on this computer, and most others.

Cheers

I solved my "Word 2004 Excessive CPU Problem" with the help of
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office/browse_thread/threa
d/d9bc05d5f147fe55/cc8809032f4c250f?lnk=gst&q=renaud&rnum=2#cc8809032f4c250f
and especially the blog
http://mactip.blogspot.com/2007/07/dependent-dylib-is-not-prebound.html
which it references. I had previously run update_prebinding but failed
to notice an error message. Apparently that error prevented
update_prebinding (UP) from completing (see link). UP uses the data
file /var/db/dyld/update-prebinding-paths.txt which is a list of files
to be operated on. By using -debug on UP you can see exactly where UP
stops. In my case it was failing on a group of files in /usr/X11R6/lib
and not doing any after those. I made a copy of the file and with
emacs edited those lines by inserting "#" at the beginning to comment
out those filenames. After re-running UP, MS Word now uses less than
3% which is quite a reduction from the 50% it was using. My thanks to
Renaud Blanch (1st link above), the blog author (2nd link above) and
anyone else who responded to my earlier posts about this problem.

I'm grateful to have this solved after 2.5 months but several
questions remain including (1) Which update 10.4.10, QT 7.2 or MS
Office 11.3.6 caused the problem?, (2) How does this file get updated,
and (3) Why was it in error?

Bob Fowles

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]