So I was screensharing with a friend (both of us using Mac OS 10.5) when he mentioned he was having problems with Microsoft Word.
If he launched Word on his dock, no problem.
If he launched Word by opening a .doc file, it would throw up some error about Word already being in use.
At first we thought this was a licensing problem of Word running twice on the same network (i.e. iBook and iMac).
I dropped into Terminal and ran:
mdfind filename:microsoft word
and realized that he had two copies of Office 2004 installed: one in / and one in /Applications.
So we trashed one, emptied the trash, and then rebooted.
On restart, the one remaining copy of Word now gave an error every time he tried to use it.
(So much for my powers of tech support.)
Now we assumed that it was the problem of Word running twice on the same network and that the version we had trashed had been using a different license (he has two).
I found an article on how to delete Microsoft Office registration information at Macworld, and we removed the license information….
At which point the error immediately stopped.
Note that we did not re-enter new license information, we just deleted the old.
And it worked, assumably without any license information.
Does this make any sense? Of course not.
Did we twiddle with it any more? No we did not.
Has it continued to work? Yes it has.
Ah, the joy of Microsoft.
(*) “Fun” only valid for definitions of “fun” which include “mind-bendingly odd.”
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