I'm not sure where to put this because it's two interlinked problems, one of which is probably a registry issue and the other a hardware problem, but here go.
To begin with, I am running Office 2007 with XP sp3, but I have preserved and continued to run the old MSOFFICE.EXE Shortcut Bar, because I find it much more useful for my purposes (which involve a lot of custom-built buttons) than the more recent alternatives. I have run the Shortcut Bar with Office 2007 for several years without any difficulties.
Three days ago my Shortcut Bar suddenly relocated itself from the side of the screen onto the Task Bar. I couldn't get it to go back so I think I closed it from Task Manager and re-opened - or maybe I rebooted, I can't recall. Anyway, ever since, the following has been the case.
If I try to run MSOFFICE.EXE from a copy on the C: drive, it doesn't work. It looks OK and some features such as Refresh Icons work, and the buttons move when pressed, but no applications open as a result, and the Customize option is unresponsive.
I have my OS and data files on separate hard drives. On the data hard drive (F) are backup copies of Office 97, 2000 and 2007. If I run the copy of MSOFFICE.EXE which is inside the backup of Office 97 it works fine, but the one with Office 2000 doesn't. However, if I copy the Office 97 version of MSOFFICE.EXE onto the C: drive it no longer works, but is inactive, as above. Also - and this seems to me to be the truly weird part - if I leave MSOFFICE.EXE on the F: drive but call it from a shortcut file in Startup on the C: drive, it still doesn't work. It only works if I leave it on F: and open it by hand from there.
I decided that the simplest solution would be to restore C: from a recent ghost image, made using Norton Save and Restore 2.0, but when I try to run the Symantec Recovery Disk it gets as far as the bit where it says "Microsoft Corporation" and you get the twiddly little green vertical bars trickling across the screeen, and then it freezes. The green bars stop moving and it just sits there. I left it for 20 mins but there was no movement, and no flickering of the light on the DVD drive.
It's not that the Recovery Disk is faulty, because I burned another from the orignal iso and got the same problem. It's possible that the Recovery Disk needs extra drivers, but Save and Restore doesn't have a "custom" option, you have to go through the Driver Mining process, and that keeps on failing. I have done all the rigmarole with the Security tab of the Temp folder which Symantec says will resolve Driver Mining problems, but it didn't work.
In order to check whether I had a specific problem with booting from the Symantec Recovery Disk CD (which I have used successfully in the past) or a problem with booting from *any* CD, I tried booting from my original XP disk. This took me quite a long way, but after about 10 mins of loading files my mobo started nee-nawing. I'm not sure if that's relevant or not.
My machine is a Socket A, so quite old, but the mobo is an Abit AN7 which was the most advanced Socket A board ever made. Following a catastrophic video-card failure which damaged my first Abit AN7 mobo I recently replaced my original board with another Abit AN7 and upgraded from two 1Gb RAM sticks to three. This means that I am using a different mobo (but the same model), different video card, faster CPU and more RAM than I had when I ran the recovery disk before. It may also be worth noting that this new mobo turned out to be faulty when it arrived , and had to have several capacitors replaced.
In the short term I'd be happy with a solution to the Shortcut Bar problem, but in the lonbg term I need to know how to get the Symantec Recovery Disk to work, oitherwise I have a fairly expensive piece of backup software which is absolutley no use whatsoever.
Is there any other program which will restore from the backup files made by Norton Save and Restore?
To begin with, I am running Office 2007 with XP sp3, but I have preserved and continued to run the old MSOFFICE.EXE Shortcut Bar, because I find it much more useful for my purposes (which involve a lot of custom-built buttons) than the more recent alternatives. I have run the Shortcut Bar with Office 2007 for several years without any difficulties.
Three days ago my Shortcut Bar suddenly relocated itself from the side of the screen onto the Task Bar. I couldn't get it to go back so I think I closed it from Task Manager and re-opened - or maybe I rebooted, I can't recall. Anyway, ever since, the following has been the case.
If I try to run MSOFFICE.EXE from a copy on the C: drive, it doesn't work. It looks OK and some features such as Refresh Icons work, and the buttons move when pressed, but no applications open as a result, and the Customize option is unresponsive.
I have my OS and data files on separate hard drives. On the data hard drive (F) are backup copies of Office 97, 2000 and 2007. If I run the copy of MSOFFICE.EXE which is inside the backup of Office 97 it works fine, but the one with Office 2000 doesn't. However, if I copy the Office 97 version of MSOFFICE.EXE onto the C: drive it no longer works, but is inactive, as above. Also - and this seems to me to be the truly weird part - if I leave MSOFFICE.EXE on the F: drive but call it from a shortcut file in Startup on the C: drive, it still doesn't work. It only works if I leave it on F: and open it by hand from there.
I decided that the simplest solution would be to restore C: from a recent ghost image, made using Norton Save and Restore 2.0, but when I try to run the Symantec Recovery Disk it gets as far as the bit where it says "Microsoft Corporation" and you get the twiddly little green vertical bars trickling across the screeen, and then it freezes. The green bars stop moving and it just sits there. I left it for 20 mins but there was no movement, and no flickering of the light on the DVD drive.
It's not that the Recovery Disk is faulty, because I burned another from the orignal iso and got the same problem. It's possible that the Recovery Disk needs extra drivers, but Save and Restore doesn't have a "custom" option, you have to go through the Driver Mining process, and that keeps on failing. I have done all the rigmarole with the Security tab of the Temp folder which Symantec says will resolve Driver Mining problems, but it didn't work.
In order to check whether I had a specific problem with booting from the Symantec Recovery Disk CD (which I have used successfully in the past) or a problem with booting from *any* CD, I tried booting from my original XP disk. This took me quite a long way, but after about 10 mins of loading files my mobo started nee-nawing. I'm not sure if that's relevant or not.
My machine is a Socket A, so quite old, but the mobo is an Abit AN7 which was the most advanced Socket A board ever made. Following a catastrophic video-card failure which damaged my first Abit AN7 mobo I recently replaced my original board with another Abit AN7 and upgraded from two 1Gb RAM sticks to three. This means that I am using a different mobo (but the same model), different video card, faster CPU and more RAM than I had when I ran the recovery disk before. It may also be worth noting that this new mobo turned out to be faulty when it arrived , and had to have several capacitors replaced.
In the short term I'd be happy with a solution to the Shortcut Bar problem, but in the lonbg term I need to know how to get the Symantec Recovery Disk to work, oitherwise I have a fairly expensive piece of backup software which is absolutley no use whatsoever.
Is there any other program which will restore from the backup files made by Norton Save and Restore?