Vista and Office 2003 / 2007

[gminnick]

Same for me. I have a fresh install of Vista and Office 2007. I do not have
any other Office installs on my system. I did not upgrade a previous XP
install. I chose to install Vista in a seperate folder and the install
renamed the Windows folder to Windows.old. I am guessing with this option it
will not pull any configuration or applications installs over.

I am getting the same errors:

Every Office application re-runs the re-configure screen like it is the
first time
Excel gives me an error about stdole32.tlb (for me it only says stdole32.tlb
and an ok button. Nothing about not being registered)
Access gives me there is no license.

So for anyone saying this is a problem with multiple office installs I can
clear that up since this was a new install.

[LaRoux]

I seem to remember this happening when I first installed Office '07. At one
point I had to do a phone re-activation with MS. A reboot cleared it up
though.

[gminnick]

Does anyone know if Microsoft is working on this issue? It seems they have
no way of contacting them unless you want to pay $50 and I am just not one to
pay to let them know there is a problem. From scanning the different forums,
this seems to be a common issue. Even from someone who bought a new system
with Vista and installed Office 2007 had these issues.

[Mark]

I thought you could provide feedback through Office 2003/2007 that keeps
popping up every so often. Contacting MS about a bug in any of their
programs, including operating system, is simply not worth any payment.

After finding a Windows XP Product Activation bug when XP released, the
Microsoft account reps acted like I was a criminal and criticized me
greatly for finding such bug. The bug did get silently corrected
through one of the multitude of security updates back then, but
Microsoft's behavior was extremely unprofessional.

[gminnick]

Well I hope they get their act together. The most annoying thing is that it
goes through configuration in Outlook for every email that gets downloaded.
So if I have 10 emails, it runs through congiration for each email that gets
downloaded.

[gminnick]

I called Microsoft phone support and was told their also that I would have to
pay $50 to have the honor of helping them to fix their application. lol. Ok,
I know I am being sarcastic, but what does it take? I would suggest everyone
that has the issue to call 1-800-Microsoft and even though you won't get
help, after enough phone calls surely they would try to fix the issue. I
would also fill out the feedback here:

http://feedback.office.microsoft.com...ffice2007suite

Maybe enough of those would do it.

All Vista owners are provided 30 days free phone support. Try 866-234-6020.

[pacheco.mj@gmail.com]

This is getting to be a nightmare for me.

First it only happened when starting outlook.

Now it's happening at the start of every Office 2007 application.

And this morning, FOR EVERY SINGLE individual e-mail downloaded, I
cycle though "updating configuration" dialog.

[pacheco.mj@gmail.com]

Fixed this as described by me in another posting:

Has this problem with or without UAC enabled, under both standard user
and admin account. However, you are right about it being a registry
access problem.

Event log was reporting specific key(s) that could not be found, thus
the cycling install.

When accessing via regedit, the key in question had a permissions
problem. Accessing the key threw an access/permissions violation,
even when running regedit with admin permissions.

Attempting to change ownership of key(s) in question "appeared" not to
work, regedit would throw a no permissions error but upon re-accessing
the keys involved system permissions were enabled on the key, and I
was then able to add additional permission needed.

For others that go through this, it is important that you get subkeys
as well.

A lot of work (at least in running it down) but it's working - there
were 4 keys involved in my case. However, I'm very concerned because
a random checking of keys in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT seem to show a good
number of keys have this permissions problem.

This was a XP-Pro to Vista Ultimate upgrade. Vista has been good to me
but the Office 2007 install was a nightmare. For the record Office
Diagnostic was of no help. I can only assume validation occurs in
that tool, I'm wondering if it runs under a different permissions
environment than the user who invokes it? Not a good idea. Seems
likely I have a hosed Vista installation and/or something is scary
wrong with my registry permissions, but for the moment we are running.

Also note, this fixed the Outlook problem, after this the other Office
apps were still doing the "configuration" thing, but after
uninstalling and re-installing them individually, that went away as
well. I might have casued some problem with them my earlier attempts
to fix outlook, don't know.

Added/opened permisions on HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. When I did that though
I noticed it did not cascade down to subkeys, but, after doing this
uninstall and re-install my other office apps, they began working
correctly.

[frankblank]

It did for me, after wasting 10 hours or so trying to figure out what MSFTs pinhead developers had done. Found it in a post on a blog by uksbsguy aka David Overton. gotta scroll way down.

Go to your program files directory, usually c:\program files\
Open \Microsoft Office\Office12. Complete path: [your system drive, usually c:]\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12

Locate the executables for the office programs. Tip: to find them all, click on the "Type" header in windows explorer then just scroll till you see all the .exe files together. Word is called Winword, Ecxel is called Excel, Access is called MSAccess, Publisher is called MSpub, etc.

Now simply right click each one then select create shortcut. Instead if it doing it, you will get a message saying it can't create the short cut there, do you want to put it on your desk top (lamer than lame--why would you create a short cut to there? - you are already there). Say yes, without letting your bloodpressure rise, as I do.

When you want to use the program, just click the shortcut you've created. Unbelievably, it works. It's worked for several people, and it worked for me.

btw, if you can't see the proper directory or files, open the "tools" menu in explorer, go to "folder options", then go to the "view" tab, and then select show hidden files and folders. Then deselect "hide extensions for known file types" and deslect "hide protected operating system files". If you feel too nervous about doing this, find a friend who knows what they are doing or hire someone.

This will NOT fix the stdole32.tlb error, but it should prevent the installer from running every time you open a program.

Good luck.

[Frank]

This the first post I've seen on this subject so excuse me if I ask why
you "wasted' 10 hrs when you could have simply gone to start/all
programs/microsoft office...right clicked on word, excel, publisher
whatever and in "send to", chosen "Desktop (create shortcut)"?
Takes maybe all of 5 seconds or so.

Sorry, I'm running Office 2007 and I've never experienced nor heard of
the problem you've just described.
But I'm glad you've solved it.

[frankblank]

Sorry, failed to make the point clearly.

The point is, shortcuts created that way do not solve the problem.

The problem was not missing shortcuts. The problem was stopping Office from trying to reconfigure itself every time it started.

Opening office from shortcuts on the start window or with shortcuts created from them causes word, excel et. al. to open a configuration dialog and sit there for 3 to 5 minutes, going through useless nonsense before they open. Creating shortcuts directly from the executable stopped the problem.

As to wasting all that time, your solution doesn't work. To see the collective human time wasted on the problem, search on office 2007 configuration at startup.

[DarkSentinel]

All you have to do is right click on the app in question in the start menu,
drag it to the Desk Top, release, and select copy here or create shortcut
here. Works every time. If it does otherwise means you messed something up
on the install. While you CAN do it in the fashion you describe, why on
earth would you want to when it takes all of 1-2 seconds to do it in the
fashion I described?

[dpant]

Hello.

I also had this problem and after reading hundreds of web pages all I can say is that the only real solution is format and reinstall vista. Most online suggestions are crap and this thread was not helpful at all either. :(

[Stan Starinski]

Right on.