Office for Mac 2004 - bouncing

[steve_hill4]

A friend has a problem with Office for Mac 2004 on their MacBook. Whenever you click on the dock icon for Word, Excel, Powerpoint or Entourage, it bounces then closes. I tried repairing disk permissions for them, tried reinstalling, even after reading some issues with the newer version of Quicktime and Office, tried reverting back to 7.1, (now says player is 7.1.5, but Quicktime is still 7.2 so because part of the OS, no go it appears).

Apart from doing a lengthy restore, I'm not sure of anything else to try. Any suggestions.

 

[robbieduncan]

Did they use Monlingual or similar to strip unwanted languages and architectures? Stripping the PPC architectures breaks Rosetta preventing Office from working.

 

[steve_hill4]

Did they use Monlingual or similar to strip unwanted languages and architectures? Stripping the PPC architectures breaks Rosetta preventing Office from working.

As far as I know, not. They seemed to indicate that one day it was working, the next it wasn't. They can't recall doing any software updates in between or indeed anything that should have broke it. I should however correct myself, it wasn't me that reinstalled, it was them. They actually weren't sure which of the two options to take, so ended up installing to both Applications and dragging another copy to the Mac HD folder.

Really odd too, my software's fully up to date and no issues. No other Mac users I know are having problems either. If it did turn out to be Monlingual would removing the install (already removed the one in Mac HD) and reinstalling make any difference? I'm guessing not as the problem occurred before reinstall and wasn't solved after.

 

[Shadow]

Try trashing the preferences? After that (or even before) I'd verify/repair the disk using fsck in single user mode.

 

[steve_hill4]

Try trashing the preferences? After that (or even before) I'd verify/repair the disk using fsck in single user mode.

Thanks guys. I'll try the fsck option above.

Just to follow up though, do you mean the plist file or something else? I guess I could remove Office completely again and use App Zapper this time to remove everything.

As for the fsck, it's running Tiger for Intel. Do I merely hold down CMD and S on startup, type in "fsck -y" and then when it eventually gives the okay, "Reboot"? Read about it, never actually tried it, always used Disk Utility on the Install disks.

 

[Shadow]

Thanks guys. I'll try the fsck option above.

Just to follow up though, do you mean the plist file or something else? I guess I could remove Office completely again and use App Zapper this time to remove everything.

As for the fsck, it's running Tiger for Intel. Do I merely hold down CMD and S on startup, type in "fsck -y" and then when it eventually gives the okay, "Reboot"? Read about it, never actually tried it, always used Disk Utility on the Install disks.

Yes, you could use AppZapper (or similar, it doesnt really matter) to uninstall all of Office and I would try that, but just before try deleting the Microsoft-related .plist files in ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft. Just delete the folder, I don't think it matters. If that doesnt work, use AppZapper.

As for the fsck, here are instructions here (scroll down). Basically, go into single user mode (CMD-S at bootup) then type:

/sbin/fsck -fy

until this is shown:

** The volume (name_of_volume) appears to be OK

Good luck, I hope you get this working

Oh BTW, update your QuickTime again, I noticed you downgraded it

 

[steve_hill4]

Sorry, forgot to reply when I got back earlier, but I did as suggested and it worked a charm. Thanks again.

What I ended up doing was using AppZapper to find the relevant plist files rather than Spotlight, (pure laziness on my part). I removed the offending articles for all four apps manually, then rebooted into single user mode. Using "fsck -y" seemed to show everything was fine, but just to be on the safe side I ran it in forced mode "fsck -f" twice. Upon reboot, tried Word and Excel and both worked first time. Concluded it was probably the prefs files and will have to remember this for future issues similar to this.

Thanks.