Microsoft Office 2003 Updates in 2010 and Beyond

Introduction

At one point, I had installed Microsoft Office Professional 2003, and I wanted to know what updates were available.  Once upon a time, that was easy to determine.  You would just go to the Microsoft Office Updates webpage and let it take a look at your computer and tell you what you needed.  But that webpage was no longer available.

Microsoft was apparently still supporting Office 2003, and it was still possible to get updates from the general-purpose Microsoft Updates webpage.  But under various conditions, that would not work either.  For instance, Microsoft might decide to cut off that source of automated updates for Office 2003, just as it had cut off its Office Updates automatic detector.  Or you might not be able to go online when you were doing your installation.  Or if you did go online, as I had sometimes experienced, that webpage might not be willing or able to detect the condition of your computer and figure out which updates you needed.  Or you might be trying to install all available updates at once -- that is, you might not be willing to wait around until the webpage did detect all of the updates you might need.  That was the situation at present.  I was trying to convert Office 2003 into a set of portable applications, and for that purpose I needed to do all of my updates at once if they were to be included in the portable executable package.

To figure out what updates I needed, I went to the general-purpose Microsoft Office Downloads webpage and glanced at its hundreds of downloads, including many that were unnecessary and even obsolete.  Then, taking a different approach, I looked at another computer, where Office 2003 had been installed in March 2009.  (On that machine, all Office programs were installed except InfoPath, and Outlook 2007 had been installed in lieu of Outlook 2003.)  On that machine, I went into Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Show Updates.  Under Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, it listed a number of updates.  Those updates had been installed automatically by Office Update between March 12, 2009 and March 10, 2010.  With one exception, all of the updates listed there were newer than Office Pro Service Pack 3 (SP3).  That one exception had not been included in SP3, so apparently Office Update knew that it still had to install it separately.

Armed with that information, I went back to the full list of Office updates.  At this writing, there were 3,204 items on that list.  I sorted them by Release Date and skipped ahead to the page for September 2007, when SP3 was released.  I noticed that there were other SP3 packages released at about that same time, for a variety of Microsoft products, including some that were related to Office 2003 tools or capabilities (e.g., Office 2003 Proofing Tools) that I had not installed and/or had not been using on that other computer, and that therefore had not been updated.  So the list that I was developing in this post would probably not be sufficient for all purposes and all users of Office 2003.

I decided to assume that the automatic Office updating feature had been giving me what I needed, for my Office 2003 installation, up through that last update on March 10, 2010.  Therefore, I skipped ahead again, in the Microsoft webpage list, to the page showing updates released on or after that date.  That page was very near the end of the list.  (I tried, here in this post, to provide links to these points in the list, so that other users would not have to page through the list manually, but I found that Microsoft had structured the pages so that the links invariably led to the start of the list.  Microsoft did not itself bother to provide a button leading to the end of the list.)  From that point forward in the list, starting in March 2010, there were not any other updates pertaining to Office 2003.  So it seemed that the March 2010 updates were the state of the art.

But that could hardly be correct.  After thinking a moment, I remembered that, because of a broken installer or some other problem that I had been unable to fix, that other computer had ceased to install updates from the regular Microsoft Update webpage.  So now I asked that webpage to examine that computer and indicate what other updates it needed.  It came back with a list that included several more updates specifically related to Office 2003.  I did not know why these additional updates had not appeared in that list of 3,204 updates on the Microsoft Office webpage.

The List of Updates Generally

I combined that list of uninstalled updates, from the Microsoft Update webpage, with the list of updates that had been installed successfully.  Here is that combined list, with links to the relevant KnowledgeBase pages:

Release Date	Programs Affected	KB Number
11/08/05	Excel, Word	KB907417
09/17/07	All Office 2003 (SP3)	KB923618
12/08/07	Outlook	KB943649
02/11/08	All Office 2003	KB945185
02/12/08	Works File Converter	KB943973
05/12/08	Publisher	KB950213
08/08/08	Access Snapshot Viewer	KB955439
08/08/08	All Office 2003	KB921598
09/08/08	All Office 2003	KB953404
11/07/08	All Office 2003	KB951535
10/09/09	Outlook	KB974554
10/09/09	Outlook	KB973705
10/13/09	All Office 2003	KB972580
10/22/09	Web Components	KB947319
11/09/09	All Office 2003	KB973443
12/07/09	All Office 2003	KB975051
12/17/09	All Office 2003	KB978551
02/04/10	PowerPoint	KB976881
03/05/10	Outlook	KB979771
03/05/10	Excel	KB978474
05/10/10	All Office 2003	KB976382
06/04/10	PowerPoint	KB982157
06/04/10	Publisher	KB982122
06/04/10	All Office 2003	KB982311
06/04/10	InfoPath	KB980923
07/07/10	Access	KB981716
07/08/10	Outlook	KB980373
08/05/10	Word	KB2251399
08/04/10	Outlook	KB2279246
08/04/10	Excel	KB2264403

Again, this list would vary if one were to install other components from Office 2003.  My purpose here is primarily just to sketch out what seems to be one way of determining what updates are needed for one Office 2003 configuration.

The List of Updates for Word 2003 Specifically 

This list of updates, and the other information provided above, seemed to provide a straightforward guide to the updates that would be needed for individual components within Office 2003.  I tested that assumption, starting with Word 2003.  That is, I installed only Word 2003, without any other Office 2003 components beyond those that were automatically installed for any Office configuration.

I expected, from the foregoing information, that the Microsoft Update webpage would detect and install all of the items from the foregoing list that pertained either to Word specifically or to Office generally,  I expected, in other words, that when the dust settled and all the updates were installed, Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs would show me just the following updates under Microsoft Office 2003:

Release Date	Programs Affected	KB Number
11/08/05	Excel, Word	KB907417
09/17/07	All Office 2003 (SP3)	KB923618
02/11/08	All Office 2003	KB945185
08/08/08	All Office 2003	KB921598
09/08/08	All Office 2003	KB953404
11/07/08	All Office 2003	KB951535
10/13/09	All Office 2003	KB972580
10/22/09	Web Components	KB947319
11/09/09	All Office 2003	KB973443
12/07/09	All Office 2003	KB975051
12/17/09	All Office 2003	KB978551
05/10/10	All Office 2003	KB976382
06/04/10	All Office 2003	KB982311
08/05/10	Word	KB2251399

That, however, is not quite how it had worked out.  After installing only Word 2003, the Microsoft Windows Update webpage was telling me that I had no other updates to install.  I thought maybe this was because it was a brand-new installation and it needed some stimulation to get busy and figure out where it stood.  In hopes of triggering some action, I started Word and fiddled with it for a minute, and then I rebooted the system.  But the Update webpage still showed no other updates available.  Likewise when I powered down the system and left it alone for a couple of days.

I wasn't sure what that meant.  Was the Windows Update webpage never going to detect that updates were needed?  Or did I just have to use Word for a while, triggering some unknown functions, before it would become aware of its desperate need for an update?  Did it matter that I was doing this inside a VMware virtual machine (VM), rather than in a native WinXP installation?

The alternative to the automated online update, of course, was to just go ahead and install that list of Word-specific updates manually.  So I did that.  I uninstalled and reinstalled Word; and when it ended, I accepted its offer to go online and check for updates.  Without the old Office Update webpage, however, that option just delivered me to the general-purpose webpage mentioned above.  I killed that and started down the list of updates, installing them one by one, beginning with SP3 (KB923618).

After doing that, I went into Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Show Updates and verified that those updates were all listed under Microsoft Office 2003.  They weren't.  KB945185 wasn't listed.  I ran it again, and it said, "This update has already been applied or is included in an update that has already been applied."  That puzzled me:  how would I have gotten its number in the first place, if it hadn't been listed previously?  Same thing with KB953404.  Anyway, then I went to the Windows Update website to double-check that there were no others.  There weren't.

Conclusion

I could have continued with the same approach for Excel 2003 and other components of Office 2003.  In the meantime, however, it had developed that the underlying goal of creating a portable version of Office 2003 was not feasible with existing programs and resources.  So I did not continue on to explore what updates would be needed for those other Office components.

Exporting from Thunderbird, Importing into Thunderbird

I was using Thunderbird as my e-mail program in Ubuntu.  I decided to switch to using Thunderbird 3.1 for Windows as my e-mail program.  It seemed, at this writing, that most people who were transitioning to Thunderbird were going toward Ubuntu, not away from it.  So in this post I am writing up some things that I had to figure out along the way.

I decided to switch to Thunderbird for Windows because I was planning to keep Ubuntu as my underlying operating system, but to focus my applications on Windows XP, which I would be running in a virtual machine in VMware.  This arrangement, I found, gave me dual-boot advantages without having to reboot.

I was particularly interested in using the portable version of Thunderbird as my Windows XP e-mail application.  This would enable me to take my e-mail and my address book with me on a USB flash drive.  The discussion of Thunderbird for Windows in this post relates specifically to the portable version.

After setting up Thunderbird Portable on a Windows computer and making a backup copy, I went into Ubuntu and simply copied over my data.  I found the relevant data in Nautilus (i.e., Ubuntu's File Browser, the equivalent of Windows Explorer), in this location:  Home Folder / .thunderbird / 6abstqrst.default.  (The 6abstqrst part of that name was apparently generated at random, and as such would have a different name in other installations.  Point is, it's the "default" folder.)

I copied that entire default folder to a USB jump drive and compared its subfolders, item by item, to those on the computer where I had installed Thunderbird Portable.  (Of course, I did these and other folder manipulations (below) while Thunderbird was *not* running.)  The comparable e-mail account data seemed especially to be located under the Data\profile\Mail folder.  Thunderbird's Address Book seemed to be in Data\profile\abook.mab.  The Address Book copied and worked without any problem.  The following discussion focuses on problems in getting the e-mail accounts to work correctly.

The simple process of copying e-mail accounts over seemed to work well enough.  I copied all of the folders from Ubuntu via my jump drive to the corresponding Thunderbird folders on the Windows machine.  I kept backups and did this rather painstakingly.  After replacing the contents of one subfolder in Thunderbird Portable with the contents brought over from Thunderbird for Linux, I would start up Thunderbird Portable and make sure that it still seemed to be functioning OK.  Through this process, I ended up with a Thunderbird Portable setup where the desired e-mail accounts did exist.  This may have been helped by the decision to run Thunderbird's Tools > Import option, which I did somewhere along the way.

When I was done, unfortunately, the e-mail accounts that showed up when I ran Thunderbird Portable were still not showing the contents that I wanted them to show.  For example, my Hotmail account was there, but its Inbox was empty, whereas the Hotmail Inbox on Thunderbird for Linux had contained a dozen e-mail messages.  I could see, moreover, that the Data\profile\Mail\pop3.live.com folder contained an Inbox that was 96MB in size.  That was larger than I would have expected, and in any case much larger than an Inbox containing nothing, which is what Thunderbird Portable was showing me.

It seemed that Thunderbird Portable was recognizing the e-mail accounts themselves, but was drawing the contents of those accounts from the wrong place.  I verified this by removing the entire Mail subfolder from Thunderbird Portable.  When I started it up, it was still seeing the same few old items in the same accounts.  I thought it might have observed or figured out where I had moved the Mail folder, so I removed it from that computer entirely; yet Portable was still seeing those same ghostly remnants of some previous state of my Thunderbird for Linux installation.

It took a bit of effort to figure out where those ghostly remains were hanging out.  Portable wasn't drawing them from Data\profile\Cache; they persisted even after I emptied that.  To find the answer, I started Portable, changed the system date to a year in the future, copied one of those old e-mail messages from one folder to another, changed the system date back to the correct year, and exited Portable.  Then I copied the entire Portable folder to a workspace folder elsewhere on the computer, and searched for files bearing that future year's date.  Aside from cache files and scripts, there turned out to be only a handful of files dated in that future year.

That effort led to the discovery that the Data\profile\prefs.js file that I had brought over from Ubuntu was not suited for Windows.  I went to the original backup of my Thunderbird for Windows Portable and copied its prefs.js file to the Portable installation that I was tinkering with, thus overwriting the Ubuntu prefs.js file.  Both of them began with a warning:  "Do not edit this file."  Instead, the warning said, I could follow the instructions provided on a webpage that, as it turned out, was no longer in existence.  A different webpage did advise me to edit prefs.js directly.  Again, of course, I would want to do this while Thunderbird was not running; and if there was any doubt about that, Windows Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del > Processes tab) would confirm whether there was an instance of thunderbird.exe or ThunderbirdPortable.exe currently running.

I opened prefs.js in Notepad, widened the Notepad window to prevent lines from wrapping, and took a look.  I decided I didn't know exactly how to edit prefs.js, so I tried the alternative that the instructions at the top of prefs.js seemed to prefer:  I started Firefox, typed about:config in the address line, and looked to see what was there.  (Note that I did not have any other copies or versions of Thunderbird installed on that computer, else things could have become very confusing.)  I searched for instructions, and eventually realized that it might not make sense to use about:config to change system preferences for a portable program.

So I tried another search.  This led to a webpage that led, eventually, to a mozillaZine webpage that advised me to start over and try using the Kaosmos ImportExportTools utility.  So I made a fresh start, replacing my munged-up Thunderbird Portable with a copy of the backup, and then I installed the ImportExportTools utility as instructed.  Then, in Thunderbird Portable, I went to Tools > ImportExportTools > Import mbox file.  At this point, I had to ask myself:  What, exactly, is an mbox file?  A search led to the discovery that mbox is an e-mail storage format that didn't seem very relevant to Thunderbird's own storage format

To test this, I went ahead with where I was in the ImportExportTools process:  I selected the "Select a directory where searching the mbox files to import (also in subdirectories)" option, and pointed it toward the top level of the folder I had copied over from Ubuntu Thunderbird.  To my surprise, the tool asked me if I wanted to import various programs.  I said no to parentlock and yes to all the other folders it asked me about.  After asking me about those folders, it didn't seem to be doing anything, except that I could see movement in the green progress bar at the bottom of the screen.  When it seemed to be finished, I didn't see any change in Thunderbird's list of folders.  I killed and restarted Thunderbird.  Still no change.  I poked around and then, whoa, I discovered that it had imported everything, including my archives, into the Hotmail Inbox folder (not the actual online one -- just the copy of it that Thunderbird keeps).  I killed T-bird again, made a backup copy of this remarkable state of Thunderbird Portable, restarted the program, and began moving and rearranging folders.

This was looking good, but there were still some things to fix.  First, in T-bird Portable, I tried sending a message that I had kept in the Hotmail drafts folder in Thunderbird for Ubuntu.  I got this message:

Send Message Error
Sending of message failed.
An error occurred sending mail.  Unable to establish a secure link with SMTP server smtp.live.com using STARTTLS since it doesn't advertise that feature.  Switch off STARTTLS for that server or contact your service provider.

A search and then a refined search led to the quick answer that I just had to stop my avast! antivirus software from scanning outgoing messages.

Next, I wanted to get rid of some Local Folders, especially the Inbox and Outbox.  I found a thread that made me think these folders were a product of Smart Folders, which would supposedly combine all of my e-mail inboxes into one Inbox, etc.  I did not want this.  Actually, I wasn't sure this was even the correct explanation, because I was seeing new incoming messages in my Hotmail Inbox, and they were not being mirrored in my Local Folders Inbox.  The advice I got from Yahoo! Answers, usually a font of goofy bewilderment, was as follows:

You can't remove the Smart Folders account using Tools -> Account Settings. You need to either edit prefs.js with a text editor or use the Config editor to delete the account from mail.accountmanager.accounts.

I was inclined to believe this because I had just run across another webpage with more or less the same conclusion.  But the advice on that webpage was oriented toward deleting all local folders, whereas I was using the Local Folders heading as the place to park my e-mail archive.  I right-clicked and saw, from Properties, that Outbox folder was located at Data\profile\Mail\Local Folders\Unsent Messages.  I quit T-bird, made a backup copy of the whole T-bird Portable folder, went into that Local Folders folder in Windows Explorer, and deleted the Unsent Messages entries.  I then restarted T-bird.  No joy.  As expected, the Outbox was still there and the Unsent Messages entries were back.  A new search led to a blanket statement that you could not delete the Outbox because it served an essential function, different from a Drafts folder:  it held messages that the user had tried to send but (because of e.g., no Internet connection) had not yet actually been sent.

So I turned to the next problem arising from the import into Thunderbird Portable for Windows.  I now had two top-level folders appearing at the left side of the T-bird window.  One was for my Hotmail account; the other was for Local Folders.  There should have been a third one, for another e-mail account that had appeared as a top-level folder in T-bird in Ubuntu.  This seemed to be a simple matter of going into T-bird Portable > File > New > Mail Account and entering the information about the account as it was recorded in T-bird for Ubuntu.  But the Mail Account Setup process stayed stuck for a long time on "Looking up configuration:  Trying common server names."  I finally went into Manual Setup and got it working that way.  And with that, the project was done.  I had transitioned from Thunderbird (Ubuntu) to Thunderbird Portable for Windows.

Transitioning Away from Windows Toward Ubuntu: The Next Step

In September 2008, I reached a point of relative stasis in the development of my computer setup.  I was using two computers, each with its own monitor, but with a common mouse and keyboard via KVM switch.  Both computers were dual-boot setups, so that I could have gone into Windows or Ubuntu on either one; but I tended to just use one or the other.  Specifically, on one computer, I installed Ubuntu and then used VMware Workstation to run Windows XP in virtual machines (VMs).  On the other computer, I was almost always running Windows XP, rarely going into Ubuntu.

I had assumed, there at the end of summer 2008, that I would be revisiting this layout in summer 2009.  Generally, that didn't happen.  Instead, two years passed.  At this point in 2010, however, I found that there had been some developments, such that this system could evolve.

One development was that, sometime in the intervening two years, I set up a third desktop computer.  It was mostly a collection of hand-me-down parts, but it ran Windows XP well enough.  If I really needed to do something in XP, I probably could do it there.  Moreover, I had acquired a laptop, for a bargain price of around $350 -- plus another $250 or so that I didn't entirely expect to spend, when I went to the store, for an extended warranty, laptop sleeve, screen protector, wireless mouse, etc.  Such a deal!  Anyway, neither the laptop nor the bucket-shop computer were anything to write home about, but they would serve in a pinch.

Another development was that I had run into several systems problems on the primary Windows XP machine.  It still ran stably, but I was getting occasional flaky problems.  Probably there would have been a list of them, if I had taken a minute to list the ways in which the machine was not performing up to snuff.

Probably the most worrisome such problem was that I had reached a dead-end in my efforts to install Windows updates on that primary machine.  It just wouldn't install them.  I had revisited the problem repeatedly.  At this point, it would probably have been more effective to just reinstall WinXP from scratch on that machine.

That update situation had been persisting for a while.  It hadn't bothered me much.  Recently, though, something else had happened.  I had somehow started using McAfee antivirus software, and I had just discovered that McAfee had been piling up gigabytes of stuff in .bup files.  I was concerned that this feat would have been possible only by mixing in data files; therefore, I had begun an effort to compare against an old backup and figure out what, if anything, might have gone missing over the past several months or longer.  So that was the end of McAfee, for me, but it was also a wake-up call to take computer security more seriously.  That meant keeping updates installed, but perhaps it also meant it was time to continue my migration away from Windows.

For such reasons, I thought it might be time to consider running both of my primary computers under the same kind of Ubuntu - VMware - WinXP VM setup.  If I needed XP, I could still drop back into the dual-boot, or just use that hand-me-down computer.  If I needed Vista or Windows 7, I could use the laptop, which was presently running the one but which apparently qualified for a free upgrade to the other.

In addition to those developments on the Windows side, things had also been happening on the Ubuntu side of the equation.  First, the good things.  Ubuntu was looking good and running well.  I had learned a bit more about Wine.  Generally, I was continuing to become more familiar and comfortable with the world beyond Windows.  I still had occasional issues with VMware, but generally nothing lethal.  As an additional consideration, Oracle had created the impression that it might be positioning VirtualBox to compete effectively with VMware.  Even without that, it was still nice that I could leave a WinXP VM running in Ubuntu for a week without needing to reboot it, while that would just never work on the native WinXP machine.

At the same time, after these several years of experimenting with Ubuntu, I had to agree with someone who had said that Linux distributions still tended to be terribly unpolished in comparison with Windows.  Somewhat contrary to my expectations, I was not finding many instances in which Ubuntu programs were delivering superior functionality and reliability.  For instance, I had bought a copy of Beyond Compare, a file synchronization program.  (I subsequently realized that I probably could have gotten by with a freeware alternative, but whatever.)  There were Windows and Linux versions of Beyond Compare.  The Linux version did not seem to be very actively developed, and it was having problems that I wasn't having in the Windows version.  The same was true elsewhere.  I was still using IrfanView, which did not yet have a Linux version; I was still using CoolEdit 2000, because it had features that Audacity did not provide.  Generally, I was finding that Ubuntu was great as an operating system; I was finding it useful as an underlying layer, to handle tasks that WinXP couldn't handle (e.g., delete files that WinXP couldn't delete); I found that WinXP running in a VM on Ubuntu was more stable (although slower) than a native WinXP installation.  But at the point of application, for my purposes, Ubuntu wasn't a serious competitor against Windows XP.  And I was increasingly unwilling to invest the time to learn how to do everything in two or more different ways.

My conclusion, at this point, was that the best of both worlds called for running Windows XP within virtual machines (in VMware or otherwise) on an Ubuntu operating system base, on an Ubuntu/XP dual-boot computer.  I had already worked through many of the issues in this sort of setup, and could therefore hope to be efficient and preserve multiple troubleshooting options without too much of a time investment.  If Windows 7, Ubuntu, or some other operating system (OS) began to display capabilities that I badly needed, I would hopefully be able to incorporate those OSs into my setup, one computer at a time, without too much disruption overall.

Making Microsoft Office 2003 Portable

I had discovered that many Windows XP applications came in portable form, or could be made portable, and I had decided that portability had some advantages for me.  In the process of transitioning toward greater use of portable apps, I came across the question of whether Microsoft Office 2003 could be made portable.  This post describes my investigation into that question.

Normally, I would just install Office from the CD, and by default it would do its installation thing on drive C.  Alternatively, I had found that I could download copies of Office 2003 that people had converted into portable format.  These presumably pirated versions seemed to carry the risks of being unstable or nonworking, and also of infecting my computer with viruses when I downloaded or ran them.

The more intriguing possibility was to use an application virtualization tool designed to create my own portable version of Microsoft Office (or of other installed software, for that matter).  Among the many virtualization tools listed in Wikipedia, I wanted WinXP-compatible freeware.  This amounted to a search for information on Cameyo, FilePacker, and JauntePE.  In a relatively brief inquiry, depending heavily on the slickness of the developer's webpage, I got the impression that Cameyo (although still in beta) was the best-developed of the three, so I started with that.

I found descriptions of Cameyo's virtualization process at DotTech and Addictive Tips; I also found at least some potential for support in Cameyo's own thinly developed forums.  The basic idea was that, when I ran Cameyo, it took a pre-installation snapshot of my entire system.  Then it wanted me to install the program that I wanted to package (i.e., Office 2003).  Then it would run a post-installation snapshot, and give me the package.

The DotTech article seemed to say that installing the whole Office 2003 suite at once would cause a problem:  all of the programs in it would run anytime I tried to start any one of them.  So that wasn't a great prospect.  The better idea seemed to be to package just one Office 2003 program at a time.  I decided to start with Microsoft Word 2003.  For that purpose, the first question was, what should be included in a complete installation of Word?  The first thing, of course, was Word itself, along with the relevant updates downloaded from Microsoft.  So that's where I started, with Cameyo running.  (I was doing these tests in clones of a clean new virtual machine (VM) running in VMware Workstation 7.1 on Ubuntu 10.04.)

When I installed Word, I chose the advanced/custom installation option, and indicated that I wanted to install everything under Microsoft Office Word (but nothing under any other program), along with the default Office Shared Features and Office Tools.  When the installation finished, I had the option of removing setup files from drive C.  I decided to keep them, even though space on a USB drive would be relatively limited, because I certainly wouldn't want to have to go hunting for a setup CD when I was off somewhere, relying upon my USB drive.  I was relieved that none of the updates required a reboot; then again, I noticed that Cameyo's dialog box said, "If installation requires reboot, simply reboot" -- so apparently it would just keep right on recording on reboot.

After that, the next step in the Word installation process, for me, was to install the converter pack from the Office 2003 Resource Kit.  I used the AutoCorrect.dot macro to restore my large collection of word corrections and abbreviations.  I also used the Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard to restore various configuration adjustments that I had made and saved from a previous Office 2003 installation.  For some reason, it did not restore all of those adjustments.  For instance, in Word's Tools > Options > File Locations, I had to reset the preferred locations for files.  To automate this for future reference, I took Regshot pictures of drive C before and after making those changes, and saved the difference as .reg files for possible use in some future installation.

At that point, I clicked the "Install done" button on Cameyo.  It spent quite a while taking a post-installation snapshot, as I had heard it would -- a half-hour, I would say, though I didn't time it.  When Cameyo was done, it just sort of disappeared.  I wasn't sure where it had saved the finished product.  The only two options in the Start menu were Capture Software Installation and Package Editor.  I had already done the former.  When I tried the latter, it gave me an blank window with File as the only menu pick.  I tried File > Open.  It defaulted to its own program folder, and there was nothing there related to the Office 2003 portable executable file that I was hoping to find.  Nothing in My Documents, nothing on the Desktop.  When I restarted Cameyo, it showed nothing under "Recent Packages."   It didn't seem like others were having this problem, so I posted a question on it in the Cameyo forum.

While I was waiting for a reply, I did what I probably should have done in the first place:  I uninstalled Word 2003 and prepared to reinstall it, again with Cameyo watching, but this time I didn't plan to continue on with the time-consuming process of installing updates.  Instead, I planned to do a quick installation of Word 2003 by itself, just to try it out.  But now Cameyo wasn't wanting to cooperate.  It crashed three times in a row while trying to do its pre-installation scan.  That may have been related to a problem with the operating system.  I was doing this stuff in VMware virtual machines (VMs), and this particular one became unstable.

So I tried again in a new VM.  It was a clone of a newly created WinXP installation, with virtually no prior program installation or uninstallation, so I didn't expect any more operating system issues.  I installed Cameyo in this new VM, set it up to capture, and proceeded to install Word.  This time, it ended differently.  After its ending snapshot, it gave me a dialog labeled "Main Executable."  This dialog asked me to provide the name of the application, to say where I wanted to save it, and to identify its main executable, i.e., the program that I wanted to run "when the package is opened."  Under that last question, it gave me about ten choices.  First on the list, and the correct answer, was WINWORD.EXE.  Other possibilities included OIS.EXE (Microsoft Office Picture Manager) and MSPSCAN.EXE (Microsoft Office Document Scanning).  I wasn't sure what it took for an .exe to make it onto that list.  Maybe these were programs that had run during the setup process.  I noticed that PROFLWIZ.EXE (the Save My Settings Wizard) was also on the list.

After I filled in those blanks and selected WINWORD.EXE, I got an indication that Cameyo's Packager was building the package, and then it said, "Success.  Package successfully saved in" the directory that I had named.  I went to that directory and took a look.  There, I saw a file named MicrosoftOfficeProfe.WINWORD.virtual.exe.  Its size was 6,361KB (i.e., 6.2MB).  That seemed pretty slim.  I wondered whether it did somehow contain references to other Word installation files on that computer.  I also noticed that this completed job was not listed in Cameyo's list of Recent Packages.  I renamed the file to be Portable Microsoft Word 2003, and tried running it right where it was.  I got a dialog:

Fatal
Cannot find RESOURCE_COREZIP

So, OK.  Not a good sign.  I did a search for that file and concluded that it was telling the truth:  I couldn't find RESOURCE_COREZIP either.  I wondered if renaming had caused the problem, so I changed its name back to the longer original form and tried again.  But no, I still got the same Fatal message.  So was I perhaps supposed to include most if not all of those other programs (e.g., MSPSCAN.EXE) in the final package after all?

So far, I wasn't too impressed with Cameyo, and I was also starting to have some questions about how (or whether) this packaging concept would work, for a program that needed to be changed from time to time, as was the case with Word.  I mean, would I be able to adjust its settings, and would any changes that I made be preserved?  Suppose, for example, that I wanted to add another AutoCorrect item to my list.  Suppose I was doing a lot of work for the International Delegation of Information and Operations Training System, and I hated typing all those words:  I just wanted to designate a shortcut (IDIOTS) and let that expand into the full name.  I'd type IDIOTS, hit the spacebar, and, boom, AutoCorrect would do its magic and give me that whole long name instead.  Could I add that to the packaged Word, or not?

Ideally, I would have tested that in Word itself.  But since I wasn't getting too far on that front, I tried Cameyo again, this time using a simpler program as a proxy.  So I used Cameyo while installing IrfanView 4.0 and its plugins.  Cameyo's packager crashed while trying to do its initial snapshot, so I tried again.  When installation finished, I went into IrfanView's Options menu and took a look at some of the default settings.  Then I went to Cameyo's packager and clicked "Install done."  It took its post-installation snapshot and gave me the "Main Executable" dialog again.  This time, though, it didn't name any main executables at all, and it also wouldn't let me type in the path to where the newly installed IrfanView executable was.  So I named a folder where I wanted it to save the main executable and clicked OK, and again it reported Success.  But there wasn't anything to run in the target folder, so I think Failure would have been the more appropriate report.

So I was done with Cameyo.  I noticed that JauntePE had gotten a number of mentions on PortableApps.com, whereas FilePacker had not, and anyway I had started out with the impression that JauntePE was considered a leading if imperfect entrant in this field.  So now I tried JauntePE.  I downloaded both the alpha executable and an apparently accompanying set of runtimes and unpackaged them both on a clean new VM.  Then I ran JauntePE.exe.  It admitted it was an incomplete program.  I clicked on its "house" icon, which I took to be the home or starting point.  That seemed to be where I was already -- nothing happened -- so I tried the next icon, showing "tools."  Nothing happened.  Third icon:  the tooltip said this was the JPE Quickie option, which the home screen had said was where I should start.  I ran JPE Quickie.  In its first screen, it gave me the option of naming an installer or an application already installed, and also the option to "leave intact any Quickie portable data [or discovery data, whatever that was] from previous runs" -- suggesting that, with JauntePE, perhaps I could indeed start up from where I had left off, after making subsequent adjustments to my Word 2003 installation.  I took a look at Quickie's Settings tab, but wasn't really clear on what most of them were about, so I just left them as they were.

So I clicked "Run Portably" and then "Run Normally" to run Quickie with the IrfanView setup executable.  It did its thing and gave me an error message:  "Unhandled Error."  I clicked OK from that.  Then it showed me the IrfanView installation screen; but after a moment, that crashed.  This was unexpected:  IrfanView had always installed for me without any problems.  I canceled out of that and tried "Run Portably" again.  Now I got a message indicating that JauntePE could not access a certain discovery mode output file.  It said, "If you have corrected the problem, click OK, otherwise Cancel."  I hadn't corrected anything, so I clicked Cancel.  Despite the error, which was apparently not serious, JauntePE proceeded to try to install IrfanView again.  It gave me the same Unhandled Error message, and again the IrfanView installer crashed.

Well.  JauntePE was alpha software, after all.  If it was having this much trouble with IrfanView, I hated to think what it might be like to try to portabilize Office 2003 with it.  I skipped on to FilePacker.  Unlike JauntePE, FilePacker was not a portable app.  It installed to drive C.  I ran it.  It was simple.  It created a 7MB executable.  I ran that.  It opened up the IrfanView installation dialog.  So basically (as the writeups had already more or less explained) the concept of FilePacker was just that it would combine, into one package, all of the executables you designated; and when you ran that one package, it would run those executables, or at least one of them.  It wouldn't actually give you a ready-to-use portable application.

So far, JauntePE had come closest to offering (although not providing) what I wanted:  a portabilizer that would also seemingly allow me to include subsequent updates, changes in program settings, and other adjustments, without having to go back through the whole setup process from the beginning.  Ideally, it would also be slickly packaged, so that I wouldn't have to do a lot of research to figure out, by trial and error, how I should have answered this or that question during the setup process.

Apparently I was going to have to pay for a program that would do that.  Looking again at Wikipedia's article on portable application creators, I decided against the category of programs that would require something to be installed on the host machine, in favor of those that created true portable (i.e., standalone) apps.  This meant that I was opting against U3, PackageFactory, and MojoPac,.  For instance, the developer's webpage said, "MojoPac requires the host PC be logged in with administrative privileges or have MojoPac Usher installed."  I also wasn't looking for the creation of an entire virtual environment from my USB drive, which was what both MojoPac and Ceedo Personal offered.  A review by nc10 said that, unfortunately, in MojoPac, any software with a copy protection scheme tied to a particular computer (including specifically Microsoft Office) would fail to operate on other computers.  Also, I didn't want to be dependent on Microsoft, so that eliminated Microsoft Application Virtualization, and I didn't want to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars, which meant I wouldn't be using BoxedApp Packer, Spoon Studio, LANDesk Application Virtualization, InstallFree Bridge, or VMware Thinapp.

It seemed, at this point, that the market for heavy-duty portabilizers was still immature.  Even if I was willing to pay up to $100, I was going to have to wait, probably for a couple of years, to find a selection of high-quality programs that would crunch something like Word 2003 into a single package that I could just carry around and run on any Windows computer, and could also update without having to go back through the whole setup process.  I did decide to try Ceedo Personal, by the way.  The story of that investigation is in a separate post.  In a word, it only reinforced this sense of market immaturity.

To sum up, there seemed to be some ways in which Office 2003 could become portable.  That development might require nothing more than the emergence of a better version of, or competitor to, the programs cited above.  While I did not think that the market for such programs would mature within the next year, I could hope that at least one affordable, robust application of this nature would emerge within months.  At present, however, it appeared that I could not make a portable version of Microsoft Office 2003.