Sorcha -

A "Reconfiguring Word" message, taking a long time to run, is the expected behaviour if you've installed Word 2007 and left an older Word version (or pieces of it) on the computer, when you change from using one version to the other.

The message, as I've seen it, refers to "configuring" rather than "installing" but there may be variants.

Once one version is configured, opening the other version will get the "reconfiguring" message. Returning to the first version will get it again.

Is it possible that the desktop shortcut you're using is pointing to a previous version of Word? It's possible that even with the old version removed, a shortcut to where a different version is expected might kick off an attempt to install/configure which would of course fail if the program isn't there.

If your initial installation didn't complete all of its setup, you might get an attempt to "finish installing" when you open the program.

To make any rational suggestions, it will be absolutely necessary to know:

1. What specific Operating System is on the computer.
2. What specific Office version you're trying to use, and/or the specific version of Word if Word was obtained as a stand-alone or upgrade single program.
3. What prior versions of Office, Word, and/or Works were installed on the computer, and whether they have been removed.
4. What, if any, prior Office versions/programs were left in place when the current Office/Word version was installed.

Observations:

Once Office 2007 is installed, all desktop shortcuts to Office programs, whether new or old ones, no longer show the file location in the shortcut properties. (Right click the icon, properties, shortcut tab). All you'll see is "Microsoft Office xxxx" grayed out and NOT EDITABLE. (It is in fact quite difficult to find where the files are installed.) This "new behaviour" probably occures if you install even one separate stand-alone Office program, but I can't confirm that.

The "shortcut" pointer will (or at least should) indicate the Office version in which the program is included. This should give you a rough check on whether you have an obsolete/broken shortcut.

In Control Panel | Add or Remove Programs, all Office programs are shown in one lump as "Microsoft Office xxxxx" on my WinXP machine. It is apparently NOT POSSIBLE to remove just one Office program(?). If you look for "Word" or even "Microsoft Word" in Control Panel you won't find it, so it may look like it's not installed.

On my Vista laptop, it was necessary to UNINSTALL Works (it came with the machine) in order for installation of Office 2007 Professional to finish the installation and setup. NO INFORMATION FROM MICROSOFT indicates that you need to do this, but my new Word didn't turn on at all until I did it, and Microsoft insisted my FRP Office 2007 Professional was counterfeit and wouldn't update it until I got rid of the other (Works) program(s).

John