With the upcoming announcement of a 64-bit version of Photoshop, I decided that I would move into the world of Vista 64 bit. I have thought about it for awhile but it is a daunting process, especially when I look at everything that I have installed currently in Vista 32 bit. To accomplish my task, I purchased a hard drive and installed Vista 64 on the new hard drive and continued using Vista 32 on its original drive while I installed and configured all my programs. The reason for doing it this way is that Vista 64 requires a clean install. It will not install over Vista 32. I wanted to take my time doing this and I would change the boot drive in the bios to go to Vista 32 or Vista 64.
Initially, things went well. I managed to find drivers for all of my devices. I have an old flat bed scanner that I thought would be a problem but it wasn’t. I googled for Vista 64 drivers for the scanner and found that a person had taken drivers for a newer scanner and made some adjustments to them and they work with the older scanner. He was spot on! Things continued to go well as I installed and configured more programs. The nightmare occurred when I went to install Office 2007.
Everytime that I tried to open an Office program, the installer would start and eventually tell me that the program was not installed for the current user. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling – all to no avail. Then I lucked on a forum that gave me an answer to the problem although it took quite some time for me to figure out how to properly run the program that fixed the issue. I am somewhat computer savy and I realized that if I had this kind of problem, how would someone who knew less that I did handle it? I am going to continue with a detailed description of what I did.
First, a little explanation of the problem. It occurred because Office 2007 installed with the SYSTEM as the owner of the program and it would not let anyone else run it without right clicking on the program icon and choose “Run as Administrator”. I suppose that you could do this everytime you wanted to run an Office program but this would drive me nuts. Now, on to the fix!
First, go to the following web site: https://setacl.sourceforge.net/index.html and download setacl-cmdline-2.0.3.0-binary-x86.zip. I actually downloaded the 32 bit and the 64 bit versions and installed them both. I am not sure whether you need both. You need to copy the “SetACL” file to your C: drive in Windows Explorer and double click on it to run it. You will see the cmd window open and close. It is important that you install it in the root directory of your C: drive so the computer knows where to find it. Next you have to click on the START button and type cmd in the “Start Search” box. Don’t hit enter after typing in cmd. You will see a C: prompt come up under programs at the top of the box. Right click on it and choose “Run as Administrator”. At the prompt in the cmd box, type cd\ to get to the C:> prompt. You will then have to type in the following:
setacl -ot reg -on “HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components” -actn setprot -op “dacl:np;sacl:nc” -rec yes
This is typed as one long sentence. There are no carriage returns. Just type it the way you see it above. Use the quotation marks where shown and if you do it correctly, you will start seeing a lot of things scrolling by and it will let you know when it has completed the task. Once complete, you will be able to open all the office programs without using “Run as Administrator”.
© 2008, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.
This did not work for me. I get an error in the cmd that states the path can not be found. I have verified a number of times I have it right as per above,
setacl -ot reg -on “HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components†-actn setprot -op “dacl:np;sacl:nc†-rec yes
All other solutions offered on the internet, “run as admin”, turn of UAC, open another admin account and run each office program and copy the reg key. In fact, no old or new admin account will open any Office program either. I have uninstalled, and reinstalled to no avail. The next step is recovery or format… a hard pill to swallow as I spent two weeks setting up Vista and all my software needs!
It did work for the first two week of having the new Vista Home Premium with Office Home and Student 2007 system.
So frustrating and time consuming, any other ideas?
Robert:
I had the same problem when I tried to run the program. It is very important that you copy the SetACL.exe file to your root directory: “C:” and run it there before you enter the setacl -ot etc. command. When you run the SetAcl.exe program it will install the program in whatever folder you are running it from. For example, if you download the program to a folder called “Downloads” and run it from there, it will install in the C:/Downloads folder on your hard drive. If you try to run the setacl -ot etc. from the C: prompt in the cmd window, it will not find the SetAcl path because it only looks in the root directory “C:” and doesn’t look any further.
I hope that I explained this better. If not, please send me an e-mail and I will do what I can to help.
it still does not work for me and i’ve done everything as stated above.
Robert:
I do have one question. Did you run the command prompt as administrator?
You could also temporarily right click on the shortcut and choose “run as administrator” or right click on the shortcut and choose “properties” and then click on the “compatibility” tab and check the box in front of “run as administrator”. This is only a bandaid. I’m looking around the web to see if there are any other solutions.
I also found this on the web:
I talked with Microsoft support. It was determined that upon
installation of Office that: a) the owner of the Office app’s was
SYSTEM, not my administrator account, and b) the app’s permissions
were read-only for my administrator account. This also affected the
shortcuts that are created in the All Programs section of
the Start Menu. I had to go into the Program Files (x86)\Microsoft
Office folder and modify permissions on each .EXE for the programs to
operate. Then I replaced all the existing shortcuts.
Something changed. They can’t tell me what. At least it works.
I also found this one which I had originally tried but it did not work for me. It was originally used for problems with Office 2003:
1) Create a Windows Account with full control admin rights, and then
go ahead and log into that new account.
2) When under the newly created account, open every Office product you
have, then close one at a time (Excel, Word, PP, etc…)
3) After opening every Office App, go into the registry editor (Start
| Run, then type in Regedit)
4) Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER | Software | Microsoft | Office, and
highlight Office
5) Then right click on Office, and go to Export, save the .reg file to
somewhere you will be able to find it (Root of C:\ for me)
6) Log off your temp Windows account, and log back in under your
normal Windows account that was giving you the error.
7) Open regedit again, and then go to File | Import and pick the file
that was exported.
8) After it says that it was successfully imported, go ahead and try
the app that was giving you problems.
Now it should work, just like it did for me. Also, remember you delete
the temp account that you created!!
Thank you so much for this post. I’ve looked all over to no avail up to this point. I was about to do a full hard drive restore and this was the last thing I found to try!
You are my hero!!! Thank you!