"Phantom" installation of Outlook.

Greetings All,

Windows XP SP2. I have completed installing on a new computer and
have everything running pretty well but have one lingering problem.

All the software I am using was used on my old computer. I use
Thunderbird and do not use OE or Outlook. I installed Word and Excel
from office 97, which I have been using for years. Somehow something
from Outlook get installed and is causing problems. It will not let
me send e-mail from word or from other programs, such as Lacerte 2008
(this is actually a much more serious problem), because it wants to
set up "exchange server" which I can't do of course because Outlook
has not actually been installed. I have no idea how it happened, but
I assume that in the installation process there is a hidden option -
Allow Outlook to Screw Up Your System - which got set.

The obvious solution is to uninstall Office and reinstall, but before
I do that I want to make sure it doesn't happen again. Also after I
uninstall I want to make sure everything is gone before I reinstall
again. So I am looking for suggestions on that.

It would be even nicer if someone could suggest how I can rid my
system of this "phantom" installation of Outlook w/o the trouble of
installing and reinstalling.

If you can suggest something, I will be suitably grateful.

Regards, Bob Taylor
philologos at mindspring dot com

If you installed from an Office 97 cd and did'nt select custom installation
then Outlook would have been installed
Insert your office cd and modify the installation to make Outlook
unavailable

You set the default mail app in Internet Options

"Bob Taylor" wrote in message
...

Greetings All,

Windows XP SP2. I have completed installing on a new computer and
have everything running pretty well but have one lingering problem.

All the software I am using was used on my old computer. I use
Thunderbird and do not use OE or Outlook. I installed Word and Excel
from office 97, which I have been using for years. Somehow something
from Outlook get installed and is causing problems. It will not let
me send e-mail from word or from other programs, such as Lacerte 2008
(this is actually a much more serious problem), because it wants to
set up "exchange server" which I can't do of course because Outlook
has not actually been installed. I have no idea how it happened, but
I assume that in the installation process there is a hidden option -
Allow Outlook to Screw Up Your System - which got set.

The obvious solution is to uninstall Office and reinstall, but before
I do that I want to make sure it doesn't happen again. Also after I
uninstall I want to make sure everything is gone before I reinstall
again. So I am looking for suggestions on that.

It would be even nicer if someone could suggest how I can rid my
system of this "phantom" installation of Outlook w/o the trouble of
installing and reinstalling.

If you can suggest something, I will be suitably grateful.

Regards, Bob Taylor
philologos at mindspring dot com