"Brian Tillman" wrote:

pennstatejeff wrote:

Sorry it took so long to reply. I'm really struggling (as a
non-techie) to understand what I'm dealing with here. One thing I
didn't get into early on was that I now have 2 operating systems on
my machine (Dell 4550, 2.53 GHz, 60 Gb, 256 Mb RAM). It's a 5 year
old machine that had slowed significantly, so a friend offered to
check it and ended up cleaning off the HD and, instead of
reinstalling my XP Home, offered to install XP Pro (for which I do
not have a license). When I realized that the installed copy of XP
Pro was not supported by MS, I decided to reinstall XP Home myself
from the Dell reinstallation disk. Not wanting to be left in limbo
if the install didn't go smoothly, I created a new folder
(C:\windowXP) in which to install XP Home and left XP Pro in the
C:\windows folder. When I boot up there is an initial DOS window
asking me which OS I want to boot with (Home or Pro).

You have issues not addressable in an Outlook newsgroup.
--
Brian Tillman


Well, not necessarily. I finally reformatted my hard drive and re-installed
my OEM copy of Windows XP. The machine is running very smoothly, but when I
re-installed Office 2003 I'm having the same issues. When I first boot up,
and then to to open one of the Office applications (Word, Excel, etc.) I get
a little window that pops up as the appl opens that says "Windows Installer:
Preparing to install." Now this doesn't seem appropriate since I already
installed it. Also, when I start up Excel, I keep getting the popup message
"Installing Components for MS Excel - Installing: MS Excel feature." Again,
I don't believe this should happen each time I open the appl. Finally, when
I try to access the "Tools/Email Accounts" pull down tab in Outlook I keep
getting the Windows Critical Stop sound along with the message "The operation
failed due to a registry or installation problem. Restart Outlook and try
again. If the problem persists, please reinstall."

One bit of information I don't think I shared is that my copy of Office 2003
(Student/Teacher Edition) allows the software to be installed on up to 3
separate computers. While I have only installed it on 2 (my PC and my
laptop), I have had to reinstall it on the PC a few times now due to the OS
problems I have had. I don't know whether this could be contributing to the
problem or not, but figured I'd share it.

All I want to do is configure Outlook so I can synch my Verizon email with
it, but I'm losing hope that I'll ever be able to do so. Thanks again for
your assistance.

Jeff