Solved Can only access MS Office help files as an administrator

[accordeoniste]

I successfully installed MS Office 2007 on my system. The problem is that unless I run MS Office programs as an administrator, I don't have access to the help files. When I log in as Administrator, I can view the help files.

When I changed the compatibility setting in MS Office programs to run them as an administrator, I can view the help files after I log in as a standard user. However, a data file that I select in Windows Explorer won't open in the program. I would first have to open the program, then open the file.

I tried modifying the Registry so that HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.12\shell\Open "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE" /e would include "%1" after the "/e". I did the same for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell\Open. That had no effect on the result.

I also tried changing the ownership of the MS Office program files to myself as a standard user. That didn't work either.

Is there a way I can modify the file permissions so that I can open an MS Office data file in Windows Explorer and access the help files without having to log in as the Administrator? Again, the problem isn't that I can't access the help files or that they aren't installed; it's that I can only access them as the Administrator.

 

[Ranger4]

Have a look through this Seven Forums thread, that deals with much the same as your problem.

http://www.sevenforums.com/microsof...o-features-work-admin-but-not-admin-user.html

It seems that it is a security measure to prevent a standard user accessing certain files or being able to change administrator settings in Office.
Experiment with your administrator settings.

 

[accordeoniste]

Ranger4, you referred to my posting in January, when I had to reinstall several programs due to a hardware-related system crash. It does appear that I had much the same problem with MS Office then as I'm having now. There were a couple of differences then, though, such as the fact that I had access to the MS Office help files as both myself and the Administrator, as long my user type was Administrator. All I want now is to have access to the files as myself, as I had before.

You suggested experimenting with my Administrator settings. How would I do that?

You also mentioned that my problem this time is due to a security measure designed to prevent a standard user from being able to change administrator settings in Office. I wasn't aware that there are administrator settings in Office. Were you referring to the Office administrative installation? I read about that installation and found information about trusted settings, but nothing that referred to customizing help file access.

 

[Ranger4]

I had not realised that your was the post that I had suggested you look at. Sorry for the error there.

The only admin setting that you can change are in User Accounts, accessed via Control Panel. When in User Accounts there are settings you can change in Change User Account Control Settings. Mine is set at the Default setting & I use an Administrator Account & I don't have any problems accessing Help files in Office.

There are no User Account settings in Office that I am aware of.

Other than what I have suggested to assist, I cannot suggest anything else.

 

[townsbg]

Open options and then trust center, click on trust center settings button and then go to privacy options. Close both windows. Now click on the help center button. Its the blue button with the exclamation mark. Make sure that in the lower right-hand corner it says connected to office online.

 

[accordeoniste]

I had not realised that your was the post that I had suggested you look at. Sorry for the error there.

The only admin setting that you can change are in User Accounts, accessed via Control Panel. When in User Accounts there are settings you can change in Change User Account Control Settings. Mine is set at the Default setting & I use an Administrator Account & I don't have any problems accessing Help files in Office.

There are no User Account settings in Office that I am aware of.

Other than what I have suggested to assist, I cannot suggest anything else.

Thanks for the suggestion about the default user account control setting. There was no error that you made by referring me to my own posting. It may have been relevant to my current problem. I haven't determined how yet.

Changing the UAC setting to the default made no difference for me as far as this problem is concerned. I decided to uninstall and reinstall MS Office to install administrator options with the setup / admin switch. However my Office installation disk doesn't have the admin folder so I don't have that capability. After I reinstalled MS Office I discovered that I can no longer access the Help files even as the administrator. The permissions for the Admin account are set to full control for MS Office. I have no idea what could be preventing access to the help files this time. I thought about file damage when installing the program, but Windows reported that the installation was successful. I did notice that an error was reported in my Event Viewer for MsiInstaller: "Microsoft Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies. The application tried to modify a protected Windows registry key \Software\Classes\CLSID\{25336920-03F9-11CF-8FD0-00AA00686F13}\InprocServer32." I also tried running MS Office programs in compatibility mode for Win XP, but that made no difference either.
I haven't seen information about this specific problem appear anywhere else. If you have any ideas about what I can do to solve this problem, I'd appreciate hearing them.

 

[accordeoniste]

Open options and then trust center, click on trust center settings button and then go to privacy options. Close both windows. Now click on the help center button. Its the blue button with the exclamation mark. Make sure that in the lower right-hand corner it says connected to office online.

Thanks for your suggestion, but I couldn't find the help center button. Perhaps it's not available to me since I'm using Office 2007. Anyway, if you were suggesting that I use Office Online, it wasn't the solution I was looking for since I want to read the help files on my system that were supposedly installed with Office 2007.

I'm unable even to access the help files as the administrator since I reinstalled MS Office this morning. If you can help with this I'd appreciate your advice.

 

[Ranger4]

Is there anything in these websites that might help you. These are only suggestions.

https://support.office.com/en-us/ar...007-Help-33ac5f0c-9c3e-40b8-acd8-85a4e8b36a60

Detect and Repair Applications In Microsoft Office 2007

 

[Ranger4]

A thought has come to mind that it might be worthwhile completely uninstalling Office 2007 again using the methods in the MS website.

Office can sometimes be very hard to completely uninstall. If you just used the usual Control Panel method from Programs & Features to uninstall it, the problem you are having with the Help files may remain lurking there with the new reinstall.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/928218

 

[townsbg]

Try installing the help files as per Ranger4's suggestion. I have them installed on office 07 and I have the help program. If that doesn't work follow Ranger4's suggestion to completely remove and reinstall office.

 

[accordeoniste]

File system instability observed

A thought has come to mind that it might be worthwhile completely uninstalling Office 2007 again using the methods in the MS website.

Office can sometimes be very hard to completely uninstall. If you just used the usual Control Panel method from Programs & Features to uninstall it, the problem you are having with the Help files may remain lurking there with the new reinstall.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/928218

Yes, it's quite possible that I didn't uninstall Office completely or correctly. I ran the setup / uninstall program, which ran successfully. However, most if not all of the MS Office files were still in the installation folder on my hard disk even after uninstalling with MS Office setup. My normal practice had been to delete lingering program files before re-installing a program. In this case I thought the remaining files would be automatically deleted or replaced correctly by the re-installation, so I didn't see a need to delete them manually.

I started reading the "Install updates" article you sent, and had the idea to re-install a Windows update pertaining to MS Office. Then I discovered that Windows Update no longer works. I restarted the Windows update and security center services - no luck there, it didn't help.

That led to my attempt to diagnose the file system itself. I found in the event viewer a recent entry in reference to severe corruption on my hard disk. I ran sfc / scannow, which reported at least a couple of corrupted system files; the others were replaced when I ran sfc / scannow. I have a good idea of how to replace the corrupt files once I find them, but I don't know which files they are. I ran chkdsk /F /R /X, which reported no bad sectors on my HD. Neither did Office diagnostics find anything wrong with the disk.

I can send an excerpt from the txt file I created from CBS.log. That's my best chance so far to fix the file corruption problem.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

A thought has come to mind that it might be worthwhile completely uninstalling Office 2007 again using the methods in the MS website.

Office can sometimes be very hard to completely uninstall. If you just used the usual Control Panel method from Programs & Features to uninstall it, the problem you are having with the Help files may remain lurking there with the new reinstall.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/928218

Yes agree Ranger there is one little problem or possible problem and that is how many times the 2007 has been installed. I used this program for years and after three machines and two breakdowns they flatly refused me to activate the program.

To make sure the Office is completely uninstalled I also used to delete the HKEY reg entries for it but always after backing up the reg which is why I might have got more than three uses out of the one copy

 

[accordeoniste]

A thought has come to mind that it might be worthwhile completely uninstalling Office 2007 again using the methods in the MS website.

Office can sometimes be very hard to completely uninstall. If you just used the usual Control Panel method from Programs & Features to uninstall it, the problem you are having with the Help files may remain lurking there with the new reinstall.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/928218

I started reading the "Install updates" article you sent a link to, and had the idea to re-install a Windows update pertaining to MS Office. Then I discovered that Windows Update no longer works. I restarted the Windows update and security center services - no luck there, it didn't help.

Next I ran sfc /scannow, which reported that corrupt files were found that sfc couldn't fix. In addition I saw an error in the event viewer that severe corruption exists in the file system. Can you help me identify the corrupt files so I can replace them? I sent a reply to your last response to this thread with the title of "File system instability observed". It gives additional details about this problem. I don't know if you saw it or not.

 

[townsbg]

Follow option 3 of this tutorial to reset windows update. Note that this will clear your update history but not the updates and the first check after you perform the steps will take longer than normal since the related folder will need to be rebuilt. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/91738-windows-update-reset.html

 

[accordeoniste]

Follow option 3 of this tutorial to reset windows update. Note that this will clear your update history but not the updates and the first check after you perform the steps will take longer than normal since the related folder will need to be rebuilt. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/91738-windows-update-reset.html

Thanks townsbg. Is there a way to reset Windows update without clearing the update history?

 

[Ranger4]

@ accordeoniste. Yes, send a copy of the CBS log & we can see if anything can be done.

What files are corrupted?. Is it Office files or is it Windows 7 files?.

Losing Update History is not really a major problem as Installed Updates still remain intact & those are the important ones.

Read through these tutorials as they could help you with the corrupted files you have.

This tutorials could help you with the sfc files.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1538-sfc-scannow-command-system-file-checker.html

This tutorial might help you extract files from a Windows 7 DVD to repair those files.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/42776-extract-files-windows-7-installation-dvd.html

This one will help with sending the CBS log if necessary.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9733-screenshots-files-upload-post-seven-forums.html

 

[townsbg]

Follow option 3 of this tutorial to reset windows update. Note that this will clear your update history but not the updates and the first check after you perform the steps will take longer than normal since the related folder will need to be rebuilt. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/91738-windows-update-reset.html

Thanks townsbg. Is there a way to reset Windows update without clearing the update history?

Option 2 of that link I posted won't clear history but it might not fix the problem either. Option 3 is more likely to fix the problem. As stated by ranger4 this only clears the history however the updates are still installed. The history isn't really that important.

 

[accordeoniste]

Ranger / townsbg,

Because of all the time I spent on these problems until yesterday, I decided to take a shortcut to solving the system corruption problem. I ran system restore using a restore point within a month after Windows was re-installed due to a hard disk failure. The registry, therefore, is technically only about three weeks old, instead of nearly six months old as it was before.

I then ran sfc /scannow; it reported no integrity violations. Windows Update works fine again. I lost some calendar data in Mozilla Thunderbird and I had to reinstall five months of Windows updates. It was a small price to pay for not having to troubleshoot the system corruption when I'm behind in my work schedule.

Now all the Office programs run correctly except for MS Word. If Word is run as Administrator while in a user account I'll see the "There was a problem sending a command to the program" error. If it's not run as the Administrator I won't have access to the help files. In addition to what I previously tried to get it to work, I ran the winword.exe /r command (as recommended on a couple of websites I consulted), which didn't work either. It appears to be a bug. I don't really want to spend much more time troubleshooting it. I suppose I'll have to live with it.

Thanks so much for helping me troubleshoot these problems. I'd post a copy of my CBS.log file here for reference but I don't think it's relevant any more since I restored the registry. I can always restore the system to the same restore point, or restore a system image if this happens again. It may eventually make more sense to replace any corrupt files. They appeared to be missing from the CBS log, but reference to the log would've at least been a starting point in identifying them. If you think of anything that would help in this situation with either system maintenance or solving the MS Word problem, I'd be especially glad to hear your suggestion(s).

 

[Ranger4]

Thanks for getting back & updating us on the latest developments. So apart from the Word problem all seems to be working properly.

Have you tried running the Office 2007 Repair. Follow the directions in this MS website.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/924614

 

[accordeoniste]

Thanks for getting back & updating us on the latest developments. So apart from the Word problem all seems to be working properly.

Have you tried running the Office 2007 Repair. Follow the directions in this MS website.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/924614

That's right, all is working properly except for MS Word, MS Excel and the calendar program in Mozilla Thunderbird. I thought about creating a new restore point, running the system restore program again, returning to the same restore point and backing up the calendar data properly. Then I realized there's a good chance the newly created restore point would vanish, since it wouldn't have existed at that earlier time. I'd have to reconfigure various programs and re-install Windows updates a second time, and would waste all the time I spent doing it the first time.

Concerning MS Word and Excel, I can run these programs without incident as the Administrator. Another standard user can run them with the help function but only the online version. In my own account as a standard user, I still cannot access either the built-in or the online help function. The other MS Office programs run properly in my account as long as I run them as the Administrator. This perplexed me to the point that I examined the permissions of the Word and Excel executable files for clues. I could fine none except for the fact that in my account, the Word executable lists my account. When I removed the permissions for it, it made no difference to my being able to access the help files.

I ran the Office diagnostic program. It made a repair to the MS Office installation, but didn't say what the repair was. This didn't help me access the help function in my own account either.

The only reasonable explanation for this behavior I can think of is that at the time I installed MS Office, which would've been prior to the January restore point (meaning it was reinstalled in early January), I installed it as myself as an administrative user, and not as the Administrator, with UAC disabled. Installing it that way may have thwarted the normal assigning of permissions by Windows. That's why I believe the solution is to re-install Office with UAC enabled, but not before assuring that it's completely uninstalled. Do you agree?