Windows 8.1. Get prompted to install Office 2000 Premium.

[HughLerwill]

Windows 8.1 installed as described in

http://tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1740371

Office 2007 is installed and fully updated.

Three Windows accounts;
1. A normal user account with a normal sign-in
2. An Admin account with a hotmail sign-in
3. A spare Admin account with a normal sign-in

Account 2 is the one most commonly used for developing/ testing and the one from which Vb6 and Office were installed; albiet most development work is done on a separate Windows 7 laptop. All works fine in account 2 and used to work fine in accounts 1 and 3; just lately though;

In accounts 1 and 3 I now get a dialog titled 'Microsoft Office 2000 Premium' advising 'The feature you are tying to use is on a CD-ROM or other removable disk that is not available when I try to run the vb6 IDE and when I run most vb6 (compiled) applications. This dialog is followed by a second when Cancelled saying 'Error 1706. No valid source code could be found for product Microsoft Office 2000 Premium. The Windows Installer cannot continue'.

I thought at first that the cause may be to do with references in some of my projects to MS Office components but the errors persist after stripping out all such references.

The dialog(the pair of them) comes up reliably 4 times (clicking cancel after each) when the IDE is started with an existing project or just started empty before opting for a 'Standard EXE'. In existing projects the dialog sometimes also fires typically twice more when the project is run in the IDE. The IDE (VBb.exe) is set to Run as Administrator in Compatibility settings for it.
The dialog does not always fire when a compiled exe (notably not in a compiled empty 'Standard EXE') is run but when it does it only comes up once and then the app then appears to run normally.

I have tried setting up other user accounts admin/ normal with normal/ hotmail style sign-ins but these all behave like accounts 1 and 3; albiet in non admin accounts problems disappear if I run exes/ or the ide as administrator and supply the admin credentials for account 2.

Sorry it's a bit long winded. Does this sound familiar to anyone. Any suggestions...

 

[dilettante]

VB6 and Office both need to be installed will elevated permissions. One or both were not properly installed which means some important registry entries got virtualized.

The VB6 IDE must always be run elevated, it was never meant to be run in standard-user mode. People got away with that in Win2K and XP by adding users to Power Users (which doesn't exist anymore since it was a security problem). Power Users were not standard users.

Ideally you'd add an elevation manifest to VB6.EXE rather than applying an appcompat elevation shim via the file's Properties dialog in Explorer.

 

[HughLerwill]

While I admit I or something has done something wrong...

>VB6 and Office both need to be installed will elevated permissions.
That was done and nothing in Virtual store folders for any user account suggests otherwise. Are there other 'Virtual' folders locations I should check?

>The VB6 IDE must always be run elevated
That has been the case on this machine albeit via vb6.exe properties (as previously described) rather than with a manifest.

Interestingly a vb6 application consisting of several exes when installed conventionally exhibits the problem (in the problem accounts) with about half of its exe files, however when these are wrapped up into an SxS installation on a memory stick or the contents of the stick are copied into a hard disk folder all run fine.

Seems strange too that the message dialogs refer to Office 2000 when that has never been near the machine.

In the end I guess I will have to rebuild the Windows 8.1 installation from scratch, however it would be good to understand why this one has gone wrong. These problems did not used to happen in the offending user accounts.

 

[HughLerwill]

>Seems strange too that the message dialogs refer to Office 2000 when that has never been near the machine.
That was untrue.

I forgot that I had installed Frontpage from Office 2000 (back in February). I only remembered after searching through the registry for 'VirtualStore' and finding a number of entries in the Office 2000\FrontPage nodes.

That rang the bells for me so I uninstalled Office 2000.

All is back to normal on all 3 accounts when running the vb6 IDE and when running compiled apps.

 

[HughLerwill]

Similar symptoms reported here thread222-254045 from way back.