Fun With Microsoft…

…or the joys of being a software tester.

 

I’ve been using Beta 2 (and the Beta 2 Technical Refresh) of Office 2007 for sometime. When I installed it, it installed alongside Office 2003, and that was not a problem. A month or two later, Microsoft issued some security patches via their Microsoft Update system, and suddenly my Outlook 2007 stopped working. I got it working again by running "repair" on Office 2007. This happened a couple of times – each time Microsoft released patches for Office 2003, it would break Outlook 2007, and I’d have to repair it.

 

However, last night, some patches were installed, and this time Outlook 2007 remained resolutely broken. "Repair" had no effect. Neither did a complete uninstall and reinstall of Office 2007.

 

After four hours of trying one thing and another, I found the only way to get Outlook 2007 running again was to do a complete uninstall of both Office 2003 and 2007, and then reinstall Office 2007 only. It seems that the latest patches to Office 2003 are completely incompatible with Outlook 2007. I see from the message boards that I’m not the only one to have bitten by this bug, but I’m surprised that no-one inside Microsoft found it before the patches were released. This probably means that no-one in the testing teams of either Office 2003 or Office 2007 have dual installations anymore… Only us poor saps outside…