SoftGrid & Office 2007

After a long while, I finally decided to attempt to sequence Office 2007. I had tried a couple of times in the past, but I always failed because of stupid things like...

• using an older version of the sequencer; you need to use at least 4.1 SP1 since Office 2007 uses WinSxS.


• not having enough memory in my virtual machine, which led to an out-of-memory error when downloading the virtual environment after the monitoring; solved it by using 768MB of RAM.

Yesterday, I finally got around to sequencing it under the right circumstances with version 4.1 SP1 of the sequencer and enough memory.

The sequencing went alright, but now the importing of the Office suite failed on me! The error message was a mysterious:

"Unable to create new application. Please report the following error code to your system administrator: 0000B003"

Some googling turns up Microsoft Knowledgebase article 929944, which informs us that the "friendly name" of a shell command associated to a file type must be unique. Consider the following example:

<SOFTPKG>
  <MGMT_FILEASSOCIATIONS>
    <PROGIDLIST>
      <PROGID>
        <SHELLCOMMANDLIST>          
           <SHELLCOMMAND NAME="open" FRIENDLYNAME="&Open DefaultApp"/>
           <SHELLCOMMAND NAME="edit" FRIENDLYNAME="&Open DefaultApp"/>
        </SHELLCOMMANDLIST>
      </PROGID>
    </PROGIDLIST>
  </MGMT_FILEASSOCIATIONS>
</SOFTPKG>

This will produce the same error since the friendly names are not unique...

So I went looking for errors in the OSD files that were generated, and sure enough, there were some duplicate "Print" friendly names in the Word 2007 OSD file. I solved the problem but still the application refused to import (note: you need to stop an existing import and start all over again after changing the OSD file before the changes are detected).

The problem got solved after I deleted the entire PROGID entry for "Word.Backup.8", which seems like a file type that I hope never to need using anyway...