Mac Forum / Applications / Excel / August 2005

I am recovering an iMac DV from a disk crash.

It has a new hard drive, new OS X and Office:mac 2004 installations,
with all patches and updates:

iMac DV 256 MB, 30 GB, Mac OS X 10.4.2, Office:mac 2004

The machine has two user accounts, one I just created, and one that I
recovered using Dantz Retrospect 6.5.

Classic 9.2.2 and Office:mac 2001 are installed on this machine.

Everything seems to work fine with the new account, however, with the
recovered account:

=======================================================================
(1.) When I create a new spreadsheet I get the following error message:

Microsoft Excel cannot open or save any more documents because there is
not enough available memory or disk space.

o To make more memory available, close workbooks of programs you may no
longer need.

o To free disk space, delete files you no longer need from the disk you
are saving to.

=======================================================================
(2.) When I open an existing spreadsheet I get the following error message:

'name of file.xls' could not be found.

Check the spelling of the file name and verify that the file location is
correct.

If you are trying to open the file from your list of most recently used
files on the File menu, make sure that the file has not been renamed,
moved or deleted.

=======================================================================

Things I have tried:

Using the Removal Office tool to remove all previous versions of
Office:mac, and Office:mac 2004 and all (nonuser) files. Reinstallation
with all updates.

Deleting
~\Library\Preferences\com.microsoft.Excel.plist
~\Library\Preferences\Microsoft\com.microsoft.Excel.prefs.plist
~\Library\Preferences\Microsoft\com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist

Both of the above.

Deleting and then replacing above with corresponding files from the
working account.

Note: The Retrospect restore resulted in many files being set to Read
Only. I did not import preference files when I did the restore, beyond
the contents of

~\Documents\Microsoft User Data\

in which I changed all files and subfolders to read/write and verified
the user's ownership.

I performed the recovery by booting in safe mode, and replacing the
contents of

~\Documents\Microsoft User Data\

with the backup.

All of the above preferences files, and other files I spot checked, are
read and write enabled.

Any next steps, fixes, workarounds, etc., would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Mark Frautschi