chris9999

After extensive investigation I had given up on solving this and we had come up with a workaround involving renaming normal.dot.old back to normal.dot after the first install. However thanks to the firm having Microsoft Premier Support we finally got a reply from a MS Engineer: when using a Transform to deploy an existing Normal.Dot file, the following will occur and the Normal.Dot will be renamed to Normal.Dot.Old when someone uses word for the first time. Step 9 of the Custom Installation Wizard "Change Office User Settings" has a section that allows the configuring of the Office Language, the setting in question is as follows; Microsoft Office XP (user) - Language Settings - Enabled Languages - "Installed version of Microsoft Office" If configured the "Installed Version of Microsoft Office" will cause the issue you are experiencing as the default language setting are stored at a document level (normal.dot) and not at an application level. the transform had been configured to use English/Australian which was the cause of this obscure undocumented side effect!

Thanks again spacesurfer. I have pretty much eliminated word from the picture as it seems it is the transform which is renaming normal.dot not word. That is the rename is occuring before word is fully installed.

Thank you spacesurfer for your reply. I wish my problem was upgrading 2003 to 2007! but its getting Office 2002 to retain the corporate normal.dot that has me beaten. I tried putting normal.dot in startup but without effect.

I've investigated further and installed Office 2002 SP3 just using the MST - ie no OPS input - just Microsoft default settings and Trust Installed addins and Templates is checked. I forgot to mention that the Normal.dot is copied onto to the C: drive in the templates folder after installation. Word is deciding that this normal.dot is "foreign" and renaming it. It occurs both in local admin installs and for restricted users so it cant be permission or rights related. I've just copied the default normal.dot which Word created from the above into default user\My Documents\Templates and it does the same thing- so it cant be the normal.dot contents at fault - it is just the installer renaming the dot file to old - WHY??

NSLOOKUP ip or NBTSTAT -A ip should give you the name and even the logged in user. If the name is not enough to identify the PC try NET SEND Name after you send everyone an email DOS is your friend - especially in NT!

I am attempting to complete a SOE for my client by tomorrow and the final roadblock is a problem with Office 2002 installed on XPSP2. On 1st run of Word the Normal.dot built for the environment is renamed to Normal.Dot.Old when word pauses to ask for the workgroup initials. On exit from Word a vanilla normal.dot with the default settings replaces it in the My Documents\Templates folder. If I delete the new default one and rename the old one the client is successfuly able to work with the correct normal.dot but as up to 1000 clients will have to be educated about this I would prefer to fix it!!! The build uses an MST created with the custom installation wizard and an OPS file created with the profile wizard which is a snapshot of the settings after installation and is reused to build the MST. I have tried everything including modifying the OPW10adm.ini used by proflwiz to specifically exclude Normal.dot from the profile wizard OPS file creation but to no avail. Can anyone shed any light on this behaviour??

Yes you can - thats why they're called office 9, 10, 11, 12 & 13 (200, 2002, 2003, 2007) in program files and the registry - but why would you want to?! its hard enough to get one fully configured especially in a corporate environment!

You could try this [identification] JoinWorkgroup = Workgroup DoOldStyleDomainJoin=Yes

I found it on the msfn.org home page . It's now at http://flyakite.msfn.org/

Does anyone know why the Multi-Boot DVD introduction link appears to be broken? http://flyakite.msfnhosting.com/ has been down for a couple of days Is it hosted anywhere else?