Zzzzzzz

How's that for a snazzy post title? Really draws you in, huh?

It was a slow week. Whether or not I’m going to beat LY is a nail-biter. If I don’t, it will only be the third time this year.

Outlook 2007 jazzed up the week when it started crashing frequently and slowed down my computer drastically. A Windows update might be the culprit. A Microsoft diagnostic utility recommended uninstalling my old copy of Office XP. But a damaged or missing install file prevented the Windows Installer from doing its thing. Revo Uninstaller was no help. Crap Cleaner found 65,000 temp files totaling 22 gig! Every time Outlook crashes and restarts, it leaves behind another 1,000+ temp files. Egad, this is serious.

A tech guy at Octopus Overlords posted a link to an installer cleanup utility. That turned the old version of Office invisible, but the conflict persisted. Finally I decided to reinstall Office XP in order to uninstall it.

That went quickly and smoothly, but it crippled Outlook 2007 in the process. Fortunately, the Repair option on the Office 2007 disk actually worked. I was up and running again in half an hour. I’m not sure that computing nirvana was restored, though. Outlook isn’t crashing anymore but it’s still got a behavioral quirk – every time I open and close a new email, it says the formatting was changed and asks me if I want to save it…then it fails to remove the message from the task bar. I think it’s still spewing temp files, too.

Should I roll Windows back to an old restore point, or just live with Outlook being emo? I'm not inclined to experiment since MS Office is running fine otherwise. Who knows? Who cares?

Hey, I said it was a slow week. Pretty sad that this is my 200th blog entry.