Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Question for you "computer guys"!

Somewhat frequently of late I get the pop-up window reproduced below. It doesn't really co-operate whaen I try to click out of it.

When I got it for the first time a few months ago, I thought it was a virus or scam, but I'm getting it on legit sites as well. This one came off snopes.com a couple of minutes ago.

Any of you IT guys kno what it is? Is Office really trying to install something, and, if so, why now?

A reinstall should do the trick.

But first, I would try updating office. Do this by going to the following link in internet explorer.

Office Update

I work at an IT Helpdesk at a university, faculty and staff run into problems like this all the time. If we know the exact problem sometimes we can google a fix. Most times, it is simply fixed by a reinstall or an update. Microsoft has some pretty buggy software that decides to corrupt itself over time act up sometimes :-). Often times finding the exact reason of the problem is a huge waste of time, especially because we have to deal with problems quickly.

Let me know if that worked!

P.S. If you do go about reinstalling your Office, use the "typical" installation, sometimes we have had problems when people chose the compact version with things like you had a picture of.

I think that message pops up when you get an unusual embedded graphics image or file type that is optional in a Word install. Not sure if there is a way to find out what it thinks it needs to install.

I really wish MS wouldn't smear all their applications together -- my latest problem at work is that every time I try to open a file with MS Project the Office installer decides that it just desperately has to install something from an old version of Visual Studio... a version I never had on that laptop in the first place.

I agree that it is harmless and triggered by somthing embedded in the page that is associated to run with office, just not an installed component. If you have your Office media CD or on the drive or network somewhere, you could go ahead and let it finish what it wants. It 'should' be fine.

It could also be appearing now when it didn't before because something got associated to open with Office that didn't used to. Such as maybe a file association was changed or something.

Could be that an MS update has forced a formerly optional piece of Office to be mandatory or similar as well.

Bren R.

That error is why i hate Office 2000 more than any other version MS ever made. You sneeze on a PC with Office 2000 and you get that crap.

I know this is unrelated to a point, but since yesterday I've had a lousy virus/spyware infesting my machine. Everytime I would open Internet Explorer, instead of my MSN home page coming up it would immediately go to a page and ask me to do a systemupdate and that my system was infected with a nasty virus. None of my adware or spyware programs would completly remove the crap. When I would be on Axiom or other sites my IE would just shut down and everything would come to a crawl.

Anyway, the only thing that saved me is that I was able to us XP's built in "Restore Points" to go back in time a few days/weeks before the problem started. Everything is perfectly fine now. Not sure that would help Mark, but if you have XP SP2 you might want to try to restore the pc back to a day you think you were fine.

I haven't had the issue pop up again.... but it's something I would see only once a week or so anyway and I haven't been surfing much at all of late. I assume that since Office did a update/install that the pop- up warning window was legit....which really was all I was concerned about.

I hadn't updated Office for a year or so, so I wasn't surprised or annoyed that there were legit updates to be made. I just didn't know why Explorer was giving me the issue... and only here and there.

Anyway, my assumption is that the problem is solved!

Thanks again to all!

Randy: Feel free to hijack....sounds like your problem is much worse than mine was anyway!

I wasn't sure whether to hijack Mark's thread or start a new one, but ...

I have a new and interesting problem. The HTPC in my living room turns itself ON from an OFF state. I don't know why.

Everything was fine all along, and then...

1. I installed that new Linksys WRT54G router.
2. I installed a couple of new stupid lowbrow games the kids got me for Fathers Day.
3. I turned off the machine. It turned itself back on in a few minutes. Repeat process several times. Swear profusely. Suffer barbs from wife.
4. I ran startup analyzer and turned everything non-critical off. I uninstalled the games. I ran the spyware stuff. I searched for answers in MS KB.
5. Repeat step 3.

Could it be waking up when getting pinged by the new router or something?

Yes, I know these are stupid questions. Your help is, as always, greatly appreciated.