Please Help. My husband has a Dell laptop w/Win2000 pro and MS Office 2000. This computer was set up with a domain from his prior employer. An IT employee with his new company decided to remove the domain, with the user logon, then realized that the administrator's password was unknown. Because the computer could not be used (couldn't log in at all) I started to reinstall the win 2000 cd's by booting from the cd. When the setup got to the part which asked if I wanted to install, repair, or exit I decided to exit and do more research. I then located on the web and ran the Offline Password & Registry Linuex program which blanked out the administrator's password permitting me to finally log on as administrator. (it worked perfectly) I then set up users, new passwords. Everything seemed ok until I tried to run word, excel, (ms office 2000). The applications weren't there anymore. Nowhere on the drive! All the documents are. I then installed win97 office since I have that install cd. (don't have the install for msoffice 2000) Now, I can see the ms97 apps but everytime I try to access word, excel, etc, I get the MS Off 2000 opening screen (with prior employer name) overlaying the open word screen and it says to reinstall from original location. When you hit ok both screens disappear. Powerpoint works ok because it was never installed prior to ms97. Can someone help me fix this problem or at least give me some idea why this is happening. My experience in os is on 95/98 not NT/2000.

Hi. It is quite possible that when Office was installed, it was set up to run off the server. This means that every time you wanted to run,say, Word, your machine would shoot off to the server to find it. Now you are no longer connected to the domain, all you are left with is the short cut. Try right clicking the start menu item for Word and hit Properties then Shortcut. See if it points to a drive on a server. If this is the case, you may have a problem. To uninstall it, the machine will probably ask for the original disc. This will mean deleting the folder and then cleaning up the registery. This can be dodgy if you are not familiar with this sort of task. Good luck. ChrisE

Chris, thanks for your response. This laptop was part of a domain but was used remotely. Office 2k had to be on local drive. I am not very experienced in this but is it possible that the software is hidden from me in exployer when I search as an administrator without a domain? I can see in the user settings files on explorer an Administrator-ASI.NET user. This was the administrator under the domain ASI.NET. My husband's domain user name is also listed with all the My Documents he had while on the domain. Since the computer was changed from domain to workgroup these two users were left hanging, now they cannot be deleted because they don't show up as users in the add/modify/remove users function. Is it possible that because the application was installed while the domain was set up that its still there but no longer visible????? It was not manually deleted or uninstalled. Any additional thoughts you might have would be appreciated.

A bit late, but.. Try going into 'C;', program files, and see if there is a folder 'Microsoft Office'. If so have a look inside and see if there are any of the familiar shortcuts that you normally see on the desktop to start the various progs (Word, Excel etc). You can drag these onto the desktop to give you access to the progs. If there is no folder, or it is very small in size (right click the folder and select properties. It should be in the region of 350Mb)then you have't got Office on the machine. Hope this helps. ChrisE

Chris, I checked the MS Office folder in program files. The size is about 92MB. I did this search under the administrator logon. I created a shortcut onto my desktop but only the excel window with company info came up, then the message to reinstall from original location. I am beginning to think that there must be some conflict in registry files that only permits the programs to run under the users in the original config, ie when the computer had a domain. I think the system is very confused right now because it doesn't have this domain anymore. Do you think it is possible to set the system back into the original domain? Will it see the original domain settings and users (only two are there administrator and one user, both with admin privilages. I can still see their profiles in documents and settings. They were never removed from domain)? I'm afraid that the system will write new registries if I try to recreate the original domain name and I'll be locked out again or even worse. What do you think? It doesn't matter to me if the sys runs under a domain.