Office 2004 11.3.5 (#5): More on missing applications; Spotlight issues, fixes

More on missing applications We continue to report on an issue where some Microsoft Office applications are completely missing (non-extant on the volume) after applying the Office 2004 11.3.5 updater. In most cases, this issue is resultant when installation of the update fails part-way through, with the installer either quitting unexpectedly in the accompaniment of an error message or exhibiting an indefinite hang necessitating a force-quit.

Fix

In most cases, the solution for this issue is to simply re-install Office 2004 from its original media, then re-apply the 11.3.5 update. Or, if the same scenario repeats itself with the 11.3.5 update, you can use the 11.3.4 updater on your fresh installation, abstaining from 11.3.5.

Note that as previously reported, there are several locations within the Office 2004 folder with data you may want to preserve before re-installing the software, including:

• The Templates folder: you might have your own templates in the My Templates subfolder.
• The Office/Startup folder can hold global templates, third-party plug-ins, and more

Spotlight issues Some users have reported that Spotlight chokes on Entourage files (with the .eml extension) after applying the Office 2004 11.3.5 update.

As pointed out by one reader, Office 2004 11.3.5 includes a new version of Entourage's Spotlight importer /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Entourage.mdimporter. The reader writes:

"The issue I am having here involves Spotlight going down on Entourage stored files (.eml): it crashes every time when I stick in a (new) non-previously indexed drive with stored emails. Other drives without stored emails work fine. I noticed that the 11.3.5 update adds a new version of Entourage's Spotlight search-file. [...] Culprit?."

As noted in our Troubleshooting Spotlight tutorial, Spotlight may not properly search Entourage data under some circumstances. There are a few fixes for this issue:

• Open Entourage's preferences and press "rebuild" under Spotlight Preferences
• Move the files Microsoft Entourage.mdimporter and Microsoft Office.mdimporter from /Library/Spotlight to ~/Library/Spotlight and then use the following command in the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilties): mdimport ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft/Entourage/2004

Previous coverage:

• Office 2004 11.3.5 (#4): Preparing for the update; more problem reports; more
• Office 2004 11.3.5 (#3): Undoing the update; Applications crash on launch (cont.) -- fixes; more
• Office 2004 11.3.5 (#2): Word crashes; Entourage missing; Documents will not open
• Microsoft Office 2004 11.3.5 released: security, stability, performance enhancements

Resources