Saturday, August 18, 2007

Office 2007 trial troubles when downgrading to Office 2003

HP desktops are now showing up with a trial version of Office 2007 installed. Since I still have a ton of clients that use Office 2003 the routines is to remove the 2007 version and load up 2003. This seems to work just fine if you don't open any Office 2007 products before you remove the product, BUT.... if you open any of the Office 2007 trial products it runs though a little installation wizard and installs some files on the new system. When you uninstall 2007 everything appears normal, but the uninstall doesn't clean up everything. When you install Office 2003 everything appears fine as well until you try to either configure Outlook or access the Exchange Global Access List (GAL). The symptoms are you don’t have access to the GAL and you can’t really do anything with the mail profile. The problem is that the Outlook MAPI service is screwed up because of some of the files the Office 2007 uninstall left behind. The fix is to do a search for the Mapisvc.inf file on the desktop and delete all instances. Then launch Outlook and recreate the mail profile.