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Applications refuse to open

Mal

Mal

macrumors 603
Original poster
Jan 6, 2002
6,253
30
Orlando
On my sister's iBook (12 in, 1.2GHz, running OS X 10.3.9), the Microsoft Office Suite and AppleWorks (possibly others, but I haven't discovered them, so I'm assuming just those two) all refuse to open. If I double-click them or click the Dock icon, they bounce once, then stop. Nothing else happens at all. I've repaired permission, trashed preferences, and reinstalled the applications, all to no avail. This is really weird and annoying, and though she can use Pages for now, she'd like to have those at least operational. Anyone have any ideas? I used to be an Apple Tech, but I don't have the diagnostics I had then, and I haven't seen anything like this anyways, so I don't know where to go from here.

jW
 
I had the same problem with firefox, trashed the prefs and no luck. It turned out to be a plugin, in a different directory - check your library off of the root to see if theres anything in there.
Better yet, run the whole program from the command line, errors will showup there.
You'll have to open a terminal, cd to the applications, ms office, ....word.app and run it from there. I dont have my mac with me, but if you need more directions, let me know.
Nick
 
I can't seem to run either in the Terminal, it says it cannot run a binary file. Any suggestions there? I need to get these working for her right away.

jW
 
I got Word to open from Terminal by typing:

cd /Applications/Microsoft\ Office/
open Microsoft\ Word

But, since nothings wrong I just got my prompt back even before Word was up and running...
 
OK, just tried that, and absolutely nothing happened. It simply gave me another prompt, and Word didn't open or even bounce once in the Dock. Same exact thing with AppleWorks. I also checked the Console and there are no log messages anywhere that apply to either programl, or at the same time. It didn't change at all when I tried to open any of the programs.

jW
 
OMG! Exactly the same thing happened to me. First Word wouldn't open n now Entourage and the entire office applications refuse to work. :(
Must say i only recently converted to mac thus I don't know too much about it. It seems though that quite a few people had this problem, did you find any solutions to it? It also seems that it was quite a while ago since people had that problem... maybe you all got it fixed???? I've got the new MBP, but still on OS X, not Snow Leopard.
 
Hi thanks for responding so fast! :) I know this thread is ancient, lol, was worried nobody would reply.
I'm using Microsoft Office 2008. It worked absolutely fine until yesterday. I realized my computer becoming real sluggish in the last few weeks so i did the plist thing as i found in another thread. After that it worked fine though it still takes a long time to load things or gets stuck for 30 sec or so. I have to say that i don't own the office cd, as a friend of mine installed it for me...
 
I'd recommend using OpenOffice (free) until you can get your issue resolved. We also can't help much when you're using pirated software, which could potentially be the issue.
 
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