Automate Your Business

Totally off-topic here, but I’m hoping it might help someone.

I’ve had a problem for a while now, where every time I run Excel 2003 (on Office XP), I get a message saying “Please wait while Office Configures Office Professional”. Excel then waits for a while, without prompting me for the Office installation disks (which it does for some people with the same problem). It then does the same thing again. And finally I can get into Excel. That takes maybe 3-4 minutes each time, which is very annoying, as I use Excel alot.

I’ve searched …
… and searched …
… and searched …
… for a solution, to no avail.

Till today.

Basically, if you have this error:

• go to your Event Log (go to Start > Run, enter eventvwr.exe, press return)
• Right-click the Applications option on the left, and clear the events
• Run excel, wait for it to finish the installation
• Refresh the event viewer list (F5 key)
• There, you’ll probably find a few entries. Double click the first one, then use the Up/Down arrows to get to the one that has a code of 1004 against it). That’s the important one.
• If you find reference to a missing component, that points to the registry, then it might help to simply create a REG_SZ key in the place it indicates with the appropriate name. In my case, it was in the Shell Extensions/Approved part of the Current windows section. I forget the exact place.

And if none of that makes sense, find someone who knows how to hack the XP registry, make sure they back it up first, and point them to this URL.

Hope that helps.

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