Office 2004 apps will not open

[KF]

I'm working on a G4, of which I am not the owner, but on which I have
an admin account. The OS has recently been updated to 10.3.9, and this
is the first time I've attempted to use the machine since then. With
the exception of Entourage, none of the Office 2004 applications
installed on the machine will run from my user account, though they'll
run from the owner's account. I've repaired permissions multiple
times, and I've checked to make sure I have permission on the
applications (admin permissions are set to "read only" for all Office
apps). I've tried as many combinations of trashing prefs as I could
come up with. And still nothing. Excel and Powerpoint pretend to
open, but hang in the process (icon appears in the dock; no further
action). Word gives me a "There is not enough memory or disk space to
run Word" error message -- but there's 115 GB available on the hard
disk, and the machine has 2 GB of RAM. Any help you can provide would
be enormously appreciated...

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Try creating a brand new user account and see if they run. If they do, just
move over to that one?

There are probably a multitude of things that could go wrong and it sounds
like you have checked a number of them already--it's likely to be faster to
just switch to a new account.

 

[KF]

Alas, I tried that one in the intervening period -- no dice. Even with
admin privileges, Word etc. would not start in the new user account...

 

[KF]

More information: I finally thought to check the console (duh), and
found that every attempt to start an Office app produces

sh: line 1: /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Microsoft Error
Reporting.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Error Reporting: Permission
denied

So I checked the permissions on Microsoft Error Reporting.app, and
discovered that while the owner's permissions were set to read/write,
the admin permissions were set to read only. I changed that, ran
repair permissions again, and then tried -- and I get the same error in
the console. Grrr.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Hi,

More information: I finally thought to check the console (duh), and
found that every attempt to start an Office app produces

sh: line 1: /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Microsoft Error
Reporting.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Error Reporting: Permission
denied

So I checked the permissions on Microsoft Error Reporting.app, and
discovered that while the owner's permissions were set to read/write,
the admin permissions were set to read only. I changed that, ran
repair permissions again, and then tried -- and I get the same error in
the console. Grrr.

Mostly everything Office needs to run lays in the Microsoft Office 2004
folder.
I would therefore try to repair permissions on the Mac through Disk
Utility (just in case) then uninstall Office and install it over again
(use the installer since it plays a little more gently on permissions
than a simple drag and drop).

Be careful uninstalling Office though: backup custom templates,
plug-ins, etc to make sure you don't lose them in the process. Don't
forget to re-install the updates afterwards either.

Corentin