How To Remove The Office 2010 Starter Virtual Drive

A few days ago I wrote a brief tutorial about downloading and installing Office Starter 2010 from Microsoft. One of the “side-effects” of installing Microsoft Office Starter on the system is the creation of a virtual drive on the system. This drive is visible in Windows Explorer, usually mapped to letter q or r, but not accessible by the user. When you click on the drive you get the notification that the Location is not available and that access is denied.

Microsoft states that “Microsoft Office Starter 2010 uses the Application Virtualization (App-V) technology”, and that it “therefore requires the creation of a Virtual Drive”.

Microsoft also notes that “this virtual drive is intentionally not accessible by end users in order to prevent accidental damage to Microsoft Office Starter’s file structure”.

While that is all fine and good, users who uninstall Office Starter will notice that the virtual drive created during installation remains on the system. And that’s a issue. It took some fiddling around to find the reason for this. Microsoft Office Click-to-Run 2010 gets installed alongside Microsoft Office Starter 2010. This is the program responsible for the creation of the virtual drive on the operating system.

It is not really clear why it is not uninstalled when Office Starter is uninstalled. Could be that Microsoft is utilizing the technology for other products as well, so that an uninstallation could prevent those programs from starting up properly.

If you are certain that no other programs depend on the Click and Run application, you can uninstall it separately. Open the Windows Control Panel and search for the Programs and Features applet.

Locate Microsoft Office Click-to-Run 2010 (or another version depending on the Office Starter version installed) and select to uninstall it.

A restart of the computer is required to complete the removal of Office Click-to-Run and the virtual drive that it has created on the system.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Download Microsoft Office Starter 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 is available in different editions just like the Windows operating system. There is Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 or Office Professional 2010 for instance. And there is at least one version that is only available to OEMs: Microsoft Office Starter 2010. This version is usually only available for users who purchase a computer system at manufacturers who add it as one of the installed software programs that the system ships with.

The particular version of Office ships with basic versions of Microsoft Word and Excel, the two most popular programs. It is basically free but comes with advertisement to make up for that.

Office Starter 2010 is not available as a public download. The only way up until now was to buy a PC that ships with it to use it. Caschy now discovered that Microsoft stores Microsoft Office Starter 2010 on their servers. Downloads are publicly available and install the product on compatible systems. Compatible currently means that they will install on Windows Vista and Windows 7, but not on Windows XP or Windows 8.

Here is a list of available versions that you can download:

• Microsoft Office Starter 2010 English [download]
• Microsoft Office Starter 2010 French [download]
• Microsoft Office Starter 2010 German [download]
• Microsoft Office Starter 2010 Spanish [download]

I only tried those four country codes. It is likely that Microsoft Office Starter 2010 is available in different versions. Just replace the LCID string in the web address, e.g. en-us with another one. You find a list of strings on this page.

Office Starter 2010 can be installed and used without entering a product key. Also interesting: It is possible to create a portable version of Office Starter 2010 from the program’s start menu listing.

Office Starter does not offer all of the functionality that a “full” version of Office offers. It is however a suitable alternative for users who only need to do some light editing and reading.

There are definitely comparable solutions for users who do not want to use Microsoft Office. Among them Open Office, Libre Office or Google Docs.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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How to get your Microsoft Office Files to Open after Office 2010 Trial Expires in Windows 7

It is good that Microsoft offers a 60 day trial of Office 2010, but once it expires and you try to open Word or Excel Files, you will get an error message stating that it cannot be opened because the file is not a valid Win32 application. Sure, you can rearm the Office 2010 trial up to 180 days, but what do you do after that? Users will not be able to open any Office files until all Office 2010 suite instances are uninstalled. This is an annoying aspect of the Microsoft Office 2010 trial and it is a shame that Microsoft would do something like this. It will be necessary to know the procedure to remedy this issue.

The first thing any Windows user would think to do is uninstall Microsoft Office 2010. This doesn’t work. Files still do not open. This is Microsoft’s way of goading users into buying the Office 2010 suite, which is fine if you want to do so. For users who do not, more steps need to be taken to regain control over the Office suite that you paid for.

When a file association is missing between a file and a corresponding application, various problems occur and the file cannot be opened. This is what happens when the Microsoft Office 2010 trial expires and you do not purchase the suite.

Click the Start menu and open the control Panel. Select Uninstall a program.

Scroll to find the instances of Microsoft Office 2010. Uninstall all instances of Office 2010 and you should be prompted to restart your computer. Restart as suggested.
The problem will most likely remain unsolved due to the instance of the Microsoft click-to-run application. Use the same steps to uninstall click-to-run (you don’t need it) and restart again.

Try opening a .doc, .docx, or .xml file and see if you get the same error message. You probably will because the default application to open the file has not been changed. Open the Control Panel again and click on Programs (indicated in green). This will open the Programs options. Under Default Programs, click “Make a file type always open in a specific program”.

A list of all file associations will be presented. Scroll down to .doc, .dochtml, .docx, etc.

The screenshot above shows the default applications to which you will need to change the file type to. This demonstration uses Office 2007. Change doc, dochtml, docm, docx and docmhtml files to Microsoft Office Word as the default application. Do this by double clicking each one individually and changing the file association. Change docxml, dot, dothtml, dotm, dotx and dqy file associations to the appropriate Microsoft Office component, which would be Office 2007 in this case (ideally in any case).

Files should open properly now. The process is slightly different for XP and Vista, but this should give you a good idea of how to approach this issue. There is absolutely nothing wrong with switching to Office 2010 if you want to. If you do, all of the above steps will be unnecessary. However, Windows 7 users who have encountered this problem will find this useful.

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© Melanie Gross for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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