SOLVED - Office 97 w/sr1 on win2k - THANX!

[2Turtles]

I've been trying to "update" our computer to win2k, it has proven very problematic and time consuming for me. Around every corner there seems to be another issue

My mom uses Office 97, I have tried to get her to like Open Office but she is used to her old program and so I must install it one way or another. This is a full version, a proper disc with a proper license and I have installed it on our win98 machine repeatedly without any issues. However, when I try to install it on the freshly created win2k hard drive it insists that it is an "upgrade" and cannot find any qualifying products.

After googling I have found this is a known issue, but the only solutions I have read seem not to apply to win2k - ie: the simplest fix i found was to rename a font called hatten.tff, but that font is not on this machine.

Has anyone else had this experience trying to install Microsoft Office Professional Edition with SR1 onto Windows 2000 Professional? I have read that I could download and install products from the "box list" but don't want to install unknown/unnecessary programs to make a disc work that should be working anyway! I had absolutely no problems during any installation on our win98 machine over the years, and that drive was also a clean install and there were, and are, no "box list" programs on that machine either.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Edited October 28, 2009 by 2Turtles

[awergh]

Maybe copying the setup to the hdd will work making it see itself as a qualifying piece of software to upgrade from, this worked for office 2000 when i tried it once

[2Turtles]

Thank you so much for the suggestion awergh

I tried copying just the setup files but it did not work, so I copied the whole disc to the C: drive. It worked with some complaints along the way about being unable to read some .hlp files and 2 others .srg. I just said "ignore" and it finished.

I had done some other things before but they did not seem to work - well not correctly anyway:

I tried copying our win98 Office 97 folder to a usb stick and pointing it there, which didn't solve the odd upgrade issue, but did let me run the program, except with complaints at each document opening (mom would not have approved lol).

I found that hatten.ttf file on the Office97 disc and copied it to WINNT/Fonts, and followed the XP fix from microsoft - but that did nothing either.

Finally I copied my original win98 install files from that usb disc directly to the Win2K C: drive - a straight install from the cd now didn't work either, but they (usb 98 files) were still there when I copied the full disc over and ran from there so I can't swear they didn't have something to do with it working. Just thought I'd note that here in case someone else ever encounters this as I haven't got time to uninstall everything and clean it up to see if it would have worked without them.

I will however, have to install Office97 on the second hand XP computer we just got (it has office XP 2003, but mom doesn't like it) so If I encounter the issue again I shall use the same method - without the usb 98 files in the mix to see what happens. I'll leave the XP install clean and won't install the office XP 2003 of course, as that might confuse the issue.

Thanks again!

Cheers