Tag: Office

Symantec Pains

The battle with SAV continued as the uninstallation of the retail version of Norton AV left a rogue plug-in left on my PC at home

It turns out that my botched upgrade of Norton meant that it left the office scanning plug-in left on my system. Any time that I tried to open a document in Word or Excel, Office threw its toys out of the pram:

Word: The file is inaccessible and cannot be opened (or something like that)

Excel: The file is unavailable (or something similar).

So it turns out that if you do happen to get this problem, then you might want to try and check the knowledge base at Symantec. You should see an article about what registry keys need to be deleted. Although, this didn’t work for me on the first attempt. Excel worked and Word barfed. However, I left the PC alone for a week and it seemed to resolve the issue itself. While switched off no less.

Squaking First Bird

A new problem from the people at RM. When loading up Talking First Word, one of the laptops barfed with save file dialog boxes constantly popping up. This would happen straight away and not stop until you’d pressed ‘cancel’ a great deal of times.

After ‘repairing’ (I’m still convinced that it does nothing) Office XP, I was still getting no joy. I removed the ntuser.dat file but that killed some of the important (to RM) user settings.

However, this was only happening on one user (Pupil) on one laptop and I’d never seen it before, so on a hunch I trawled into the user profile, Application Settings\Talking First Word. Lo and behold, there was a .tmp file sitting there. One swift click of the ‘delete’ key, and the error didn’t appear again.

I’m guessing that the temporary file had some crap in it which was throwing RM Talking First Word’s silicon toys out of it’s virtual pram.