There I was, lost in an alternate geek universe! Let me start at the beginning.

Once upon a time, Snow White… Ooops, wrong story! The following is the real story.

I had been using Vista when it was still in beta and I had no real issues with my Office 2003 Suite. At the time I was dual booting Vista and XP on my desktop with each program having its own drive - kind of like separate apartments. When Vista was launched I formatted the hard drive with the Vista beta installed and proceeded to install Vista as an upgrade over XP. The install went smoothly with no problems. There were a few legacy programs that did not perform properly but I was aware of those issues as I had used the Vista Upgrade Advisor. Other than NERO, there were no programs with problems that were necessary in my day to day work and play on my desktop. Most of my financial data is on my laptop as well as on backup.

One of the first things I did when Vista was installed and ready to roar was to open Microsoft Outlook. For some strange reason the EULA (End User Licensing Agreement) popped up asking me to verify that I accepted the terms and conditions in the EULA. I clicked on accept and continued to work in Outlook. Later that evening I shut down Outlook as well as the desktop.

The next morning I once again opened Outlook and lo and behold, up popped the EULA with the same dumb question! This was strange, so I closed Outlook and reopened it. TA-DA… EULA! At this point I decided to venture into the vast world of the Help menu and decided to click on “Activate” just in case I needed to reactivate the program. Nope, I was advised my product was activated… hhhmmm? Some further investigation led me to discover that this strange behavior exhibited itself on all of my Office 2003 programs. This is the point where I told myself to stay calm.

I needed to go on a hunt and the first place I went hunting was a group that some of us formed when we were all involved in beta testing Windows 98. Quite an accomplishment that we have stayed together this long and have a list-serve to communicate. One of the members of the group, David Vair, came up with the answer for me and I share it here with all of you.

Apparently this behavior is being experienced by many users and Dave steered me to this Web site. Read through the posts there and problem solved - no more EULA. It references running the programs as administrator. There are some other fixes out there, but for now this works for me and eliminates the necessity to muck around in the registry.

[tags]Connie Devine, vista, upgrade os, office 2003, windows, xp, google[/tags]