Re-installation of Office 2003

[Pheasant Plucker®]

Apologies for cross-posting...not sure which group would be suitable as my
question concerns both subjects.

I need to un-install & re-install Office Pro 2003 on some XP Tablet PC's to
fix some issues we are having where our custom application has lost its
connection to Outlook.

The main thing for me would be to retain as many Outlook settings as
possible to save time configuring & testing.

I will save the .pst file so the emails are retained but what else does the
..pst file hold?

Address book?
Email account details (including passwords maybe?)
Anything else?

And how would I ensure when I re-install I can overcome the 2GB .pst limit?

Any other gotcha's with re-installing the entire Office 2003 package?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

First of all; reinstalling won't help you with configuration issues as
reinstalling won't delete any data or settings.

Also reinstalling won't do anything about the pst-file limit. The limit
comes from the file format and not from the Outlook installation. You'll
need to create a new pst-file that uses the UNICODE file format instead of
the ANSI file format (97-2002 pst-file).

Additionally see http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/aboutpst.htm

 

[Pheasant Plucker®]

Thanks for the quick reply

The re-installation of Office does fix the lost connectivity between our
custom app and Outlook - I tried it on a development machine after trying
many other things :-(

I believe it has something to do with .NET that our custom app runs under
(wish I could find a way to solve that rather than re-install Office) and
did not appear to be an Office issue...it was broken @ last December by a
Microsoft update...

I have taken a look at the resource you mentioned - thanks.

I will do some more research before I try this on a 'live' machine!

Thanks & regards,
-=Glyn=-

 

[Roady [MVP]]

The fact that a reinstall fixes your issues suggests a component
registration issue or that certain components are overwritten at a later
instance. You can then get into a conflict with the dependencies. This means
that your reinstall will have restored the Outlook/custom app dependencies
but have broken another. If that fixes (itself) the connection will break
again.

I can't be more specific at this level of detail. But if you suspect it has
something directly to do with your custom app or the .NET framework, you can
check with the developers in the programming newsgroups down the hall.

Good luck!

 

[Pheasant Plucker®]

OK...the re-installation of Office seemed to go without a hitch.

It looks like no re-configuring is needed at all, email accounts, rules &
even a MAPI AddIn called Attachments Processor has been carried across -
brilliant!

And here was me worrying that I would have to reconfigure email accounts,
rules, menu layouts etc. etc. :-/

One last question if I may - I have a W2K machine running Office 2000 that I
wish to 'retire'

I have built a new XP machine and installed Office 2003.

I tried copying the .pst file across from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2003 and
although all my emails were there I had lost all my other settings such as
email accounts, rules, etc. etc.

Not quite so painless as 2003->2003 it would appear...

Is there anything I can do to ease the transition or do I have to configure
all my settings on the 2003 machine?

Thanks & regards,
-=Glyn=-

 

[Pheasant Plucker®]

The very first place I tried for that particular problem was the dotnet
developers newsgroup...but because my OP stated that I wasn't the developer
I was told they could not help me and I should contact the developer :-(

Good luck indeed! ;^)

I tried everything I could think of including downloading PIA and
uninstalling/re-installing .NET as I thought the Office option was a last
resort - turned out not only to be the only option that worked but also the
easiest by far!

Many thanks Roady...

Kind regards,
-=Glyn=-

 

[Roady [MVP]]

No, since this is a migration across versions I would recommend to
reconfigure manually. This is a far less painless process than fixing all
sorts of weird issues later. You'll need to start with a new pst-file anyway
when you want to take advantage of the new UNICODE file format.