Solution for Office 2004 Install Quit (after license)

[Lee Honeycutt]

We've found a workaround for earlier posts about the Office 2004
installation process quiting just after accepting the license.
Apparently, this is caused by some type of corruption in the target
admin account, so on the advice of our IT people, I created a new
account, made it an Admin, then logged into this new account and
installed Office, no problem.

I then logged back into the original problem account and had no
difficulties opening any of the Office apps or adding them to the
Dock.

-- Lee

 

[Tom]

This turned out to - partially - solve my problem. I was having
exactly the same freeze after accepting the license. By creating a new
admin account I was able to complete the Office 2004 install.

However ... one primary reason why I was upgrading from Office X on
this system was because all the Office X programs were frequently
stalling with the spinning wheel as if they were involved in a virtual
memory swap. This happened even if no other program was running and
always during their startup. Typically one would have to wait a couple
- 3 minutes before Word or Excel would finally stop fibrillating and
open up. I was suspicious that this was the same problem when the
Office 2004 install went into a spinning wheel, but in that case after
approx the same amount of time the installer just died.

So ... now with the new Office 2004 in, I am getting the same long
stalls on the old admin account, but not !! on the new admin account I
created to do the install.

In dealing with this fiasco, I have done everything imaginable: shut
off all but system fonts, repair permissions, remove all old Offices,
and even completely reinstall OS X 10.3 from the CD and update to the
latest version.

I still have the same unsatisfactory situation with long waits in
Excel and Word at startup and even during document editing on my main
account. It would not be at all good if I have to move to the other
admin account just for MS Office activities. No other applications are
having this problem.

I cannot imagine what is the problem with the particular account that
would cause this problem. I hope Microsoft is reading this and that
they or someone else can provide a fix.

Tom

 

[Tom]

I finally resolved this issue by taking advantage of a nice feature in
Apple's Activity Monitor that allows you to sample the actual C code
of a process. I sampled Word and Excel when they were hung and it
appeared they were looking for an alias.

After looking all over for a possible culprit alias, I found that
user/Documents/Microsoft User Data was an alias that for many years
had pointed to the folder of the same name in my OS 9 area on another
disk. For an unknown reason, sometime in June this alias had lost its
target, and the MS Office programs just hang for a couple of minutes
each time they need to get at the user data through a bad alias. This
happens a couple of times during program start up and on occasion
during editing activities.

I suspect, but can't confirm, that this was also the source of the
hang and crash during installation of Office 2004. At any rate, with
the alias target fixed, the Office programs are running fine.

So the "corrupted" admin account is just one with a bad alias. Of
course, it would be nice if Microsoft would fix this behavior, with a
dialog warning rather than a hang/crash when they can't find an
alias...

Tom