Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations SkipVought on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Access 2003 Reinstalls Every Time

Status
Not open for further replies.

idrawstuff

Technical User
Feb 10, 2005
17
0
0
US
Hi! I previously had Office XP installed via Group Policy on several workstations, and for various reasons outlined elsewhere on the site, I upgraded to Office 2003. At the time I upgraded, I didn't know anything about what a Group Policy was (our IT guy left the company some time back, and as of yet we haven't been able to replace him). So when shortcuts to Office XP kept reinstalling itself after every reboot, I tried various things to stop it before I learned (through this site, actually) about Group Policies and what actually went wrong.

The solution, by the way, was to disable the Group Policy and THEN upgrade to Office 2003.

We have eight workstations in the office, and two were used as guinea pigs. On the two test computers, I had done full uninstalls and reinstalls prior to finding my solution. On the rest, I upgraded from the original installs after disabling the group policy. When I was finished, I installed SP3 on all workstations.

On the six upgrades, every thing works fine. On the two that were done as full installs, Access 2003 has to reinstall itself every time I open the program up.

I did some research and found seemed to at least address the problem. It gives advice on how to manually change the registry:

To resolve this problem, manually change the registry on the computer where Access 2003 does not start as expected. To do this, follow these steps:
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel
3. In the right pane, right-click win32, and then click Modify.
4. In the Value data box, type the following, and then click OK:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\msaexp30.dll
Note This path is for the default location. If the Msaexp30.dll file is located on another drive or in another folder, use the path of the actual drive and folder.
5. Exit Registry Editor, and then start Access 2003.


However, on the two computers in which I did full installs, the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel" doesn't exist. It exists on all computers that the upgrade was done on (I imagine it has something to do with upgrading from a Group Policy, but I'm no expert), but that doesn't really matter because SP3 addressed those issues.

So my question, finally, is if anyone knows how I can fix this problem on my two guinea pigs? Is there a different place I can edit the registry? I have a Win32 file in a "...Engines/Sharepoint" folder, but so does the six upgrades.

Any thoughts?
 
This might be a sledge-hammer to crack a nut, but if you don't get a more educated response...
I think I would un-install 2003, install XP, disable group policies, upgrade...

Basically I would take these machines back to how they were, and then do the thing that you know worked on the others.

I don't believe this is your best option, I'll grant you that, but if no-one responds with a better idea it might just work at least.

Fee

The question should be [red]Is it worth trying to do?[/red] not [blue] Can it be done?[/blue]
 
You might want to post this in the Access forums. There's about 7 of them. The Access gurus rarely look at this forum.
 
silly question: did u install it under admin account or or under user account?

installing it under admin acct works better.

another silly question: if the dll that the registry refers to exist on the machines with problem, then can u not export the particular registry and install it on the other machine?

of course, u need to have registry know-how.

_______________________________________
_______________________________________
 
Thanks for the words of advice guys - I didn't even see an Access forum, but now that I know it's out there I'll make it a point of cross posting there.

Willif, I totally agree that your solution would be worth a try in an extreme circumstance, and if I can't find a better option that's what I'll do (although I may be back to find help on setting up group policies!).

Onedtent, I know it seems like a silly question, but I had the same thought after my first problems, and this WAS installed as admin (just in case). I had no idea whether or not it would make a difference, so I asked the same silly question and gave it another try! As far as that dll file, the Win32 file is located in the proper place on the other machines, but the directory itself doesn't exist at all on the broken machines (which I imagine has something to do with the working machines having been upgraded from a group policy, while these were full installs done after a full removal of a group policy). Still, I had the same thought.

Thanks again for the help guys!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top