I was given this PC because it didn't sell at a garage sale and was fixing it up for someone who needed Office. It had a really slow IBM/Hitachi 15 gig drive. I put in an ATA66 card and attached a WD 20 gig to it and cloned the Hitachi with WD's latest Data Lifeguard tools. Everything seems to work OK with the WD except when opening Word, Excel or whatever the windows installer opens and says there's problem and wants to run a repair. I don't have the disk so can't do that. If I close the installer the Office component will open and seem to function normally. Also, some of the Office icons have gotten 'lost' and been replaced by generic ones. Understand that Office works perfectly fine on the Hitachi and the only change I made was to clone it to the WD. And everything else seems to run just fine on the WD. I'm going to download the full install SP 3 (on dialup so it'll take awhile) and install it on the Hitachi and try the cloning again. If that doesn't work I'll try another drive. In the meantime I was wondering if this was a problem anyone else had come across before and if so, if there was a fix they were aware of.

I cloned a WD drive with the Data Lifeguard tools on my daughter's PC and Office wouldn't run until I removed then reinstalled it. In addition, before I could reinstall it, I had to run the installer cleanup utility found here. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301 The bad news is I'm guessing that you don't have the install CD's. Might be time for OOO3.

Thanks, yeah, no cds. Couldn't do the upgrade either without the cds. I've asked around to see if somehow can get me a copy. Don't need a new product key. I tried another WD drive with the same results. I think WD uses Acronis now but the download for that was something like 100 meg and with dialup I wasn't in a hurry to do that. I think I'll put in an old maxtor and use their utility and see what happens. I'm only keeping the clunker because of the office XP and of course with the windows xp it's locked to this motherboard. I would have scrapped it otherwise.