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From: AlexBY on 25 Nov 2009 03:39

Hello let me add my 5 cents.

A Ken said it's very important to make from time to time dump of Office
settings only! (I know need to grab all my windows profile for this
purpose).

Let me describe my worries about settings.
I started using office "Save sett..." wizard somewhere in 2003.
I always try to get the most from software I use by adjusting it and
customizing. Regarding the office I actively use "shortcuts" navigation
pane in Outlook, templates, forms and places in "open/save" dialogs
(let's skip other minor things I need).
Every unexpected close of Outlook (even it seemed to me everything was
fine while closing it) resulted to resetting all changes made in
"shortcuts" navigation pane to single item - "Add shortcut" - the only
fast way to fix this I found that time - is just restore settings via
wizard. (the other way is add again about 30 shortcuts in use at that
moment). I started saving settings every half of the year (about 50% of
shortcuts were changed in that period).
Using wizard I migrated from Win2k to XP without any time loss.
Migration from XP to Windows 7 plus migration from Office 2003 to 2007
took about 3 days!!!
I tried USMT - isn't supported by 64 bit Win 7!!!
It was horrible situation, finally I overcame it.

As for now, after 3 month of experience with Win7 + Office 2007 I got
my environment broken!
Yes, that's my fault - I had issues with installing one program
packaged with MS Visual Studio 2008. It said the installation was
terminated in previous run and please start it again - it said it all
the time, every run. I decided to clean up "%SystemRoot%\Installer"
folder completely in order to erase installation related settings - that
was *BIG mistake* as I found it out then.
Many programs and Office as well, persist there specific databases and
*icons* for *running programs* (installed somewhere in "C:\Program Files
....")
As a result MS Office lost all icons for
- Programs (lost icons without possibility to fix it manually in
explorer)
- files (documents were recognized by Win, but their appearance in
explore were as files with unknown type to process)

After such barbarian clean up method regarding to MS Office, "Repair,
add/remove" installation actions from "Control Panel"/"Programs" were
impossible - installation started, asked for distributive (I pointed it
to distributive on network drive), started progressing and in the middle
of the process said "the installation was terminated due to errors" -
nothing else (no logs for user, no reasons why, no suggestions).
I spent about 4 hours to get icon binaries, edit the registry and fix
the issue with icons.

I contacted our system administrators about the issue - complete
physical removal of MS Office and install it again is suggested as
single solution in my case.

As for the topic: Saving settings of Office 2007.
I want to save current my "office 2007 user settings" only (including
mail rules/filters, shortcuts and the rest in Outlook, menu items on the
ribbons and etc.) and reinstall MS Office 2007
I believe most of the things still persisted in registry and Windows
Easy Transfer will not grab these things and for me.
At the same time I see WET collects the files from profiles (sure
templates and signatures will be picked up) - I don't believe it knows
about all office settings because they are different products.
So I don't think WET will help me - I'm not going to kill folders in
profile - the files will remain there. But *many my settings of Office
will be lost*!

To my mind, each software should have specific supporting product
(implemented by the same developers, because they know all settings
storages - where and how it's stored)

I see now, I had support from the Office team in version 2003.
But now I have to pay extra money for this support -
http://www.settingsbackup.com/index.asp


--
AlexBY
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