Office 2007 stopped recognizing the current user, yet current user is the only user. Why?

April 9, 2007 9:05 PM

Suddenly, Office 2007 has stopped working on my computer, giving this error: "Microsoft Word has not been installed for the current user." But, the odd thing is, I only have one user name on my computer, I have always signed in as myself, and it has worked just fine since I installed it several weeks ago. Any ideas as to why this has happened? Is uninstalling and re-instaling it the only way to fix it? I searched a bit online, and found the same problem in older versions of Office, and this seems to be the only solution. But anyway, I am really more concerned with why this has happened.
posted by waywardgirl to Technology (9 answers total)

Well, did you unistall and reinstall?

(You don't have Vista by any chance, do you?)
posted by niles at 9:15 PM on April 9, 2007

Response by poster: I do not have Vista. I have XP. I did not uninstall and reinstall, yet, because I am too tired to go and find my disk. I am really more concerned with why this happened. How could I suddenly be the wrong user, when I am the only user?
posted by waywardgirl at 9:18 PM on April 9, 2007

I would probably write this up as a bug in new software. XP almost always has other, invisible accounts but that shouldn't come into play here. If you don't get around to reinstalling, you may want to check for updates to Office.
posted by niles at 9:28 PM on April 9, 2007

Probably you got bagged by Microsoft "Genuine Advantage", the wonderful program/feature that Microsoft may have pushed to you (through automatic update) that deactivates your software if its algorithms think that software was pirated.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:31 PM on April 9, 2007

(but if you did have Vista, you'd want to turn off UAC, run Word/Office, and then re-enable UAC)
posted by niles at 9:31 PM on April 9, 2007

Did you change your computer name recently? That often causes the user to get all funky.
posted by sbutler at 11:29 PM on April 9, 2007

I think SC.DB has it; a new wave of the "Windows Genuine Advantage" malware has just been pushed out in Automatic Updates, and it's doing its usual thing of being nothing but a goddamn nuisance.

I'm recommending to everybody I support that they not agree to the EULA for WGA when it goes to install itself; at least, not until the day Microsoft gets cheeky enough to make the shitty little bastard absolutely necessary for Windows to keep functioning. If a significant enough percentage of the legit userbase refuses to install this crap, that day will be postponed for a while.
posted by flabdablet at 2:28 AM on April 10, 2007

I've seen this error message in the past. In my experience, it generally has nothing to do with users or anything, despite the error message. Usually it means that a file in the install has somehow gotten corrupted, and the generic Office error message when it encounters this problem is "Not installed for the current user" when it really means "not installed for ANY users". Usually a repair installation fixes it up real nice like.
posted by antifuse at 2:58 AM on April 10, 2007

Response by poster: Hmm. In a fascinating turn of events, I have now discovered that I only get the message when I try to open a document by clicking on the document's icon in order to open both the document and the program. If I open Word first and then use the Open menu to access the file, everything works fine. Very strange.
posted by waywardgirl at 8:21 AM on April 10, 2007