Different versions of Office on same Windows 10 laptop

[GeekGirlInFurs]

Hi. I have a Windows 10 Pro laptop that had Office 2007 Professional installed. I then installed Office 2019 Professional on the same device. Each version of Office is working fine.

But when I run the Word 2007, right after it starts to run, the Office 2007 setup process starts to run, says it's configuring Office 2007 Professional, with a progress bar. When I close that window, it asks for confirmation that I want to cancel setup. I say yes. Then it a message says "Preparing to install." I click cancel. Then I click OK to confirm it. And then.... Word 2007 continues to load and runs perfectly.

If I don't back out of any of those dialogs and just let it run, takes about two minutes to finish whatever it's doing, an then Word still continues loading and runs perfectly. BUT the next time I run Word 2007, the same things happens.

The Office 2019 installation must have updated or moved something very basic (and probably primordial) at in the basic Office install folders or maybe in the registry, that Word 2007 is looking for in a particular place, can't find it, so Office 2007 tries to fix the problem. But the problem always returns EVEN if no component of Office 2019 has been run in the interim.

Does any of this make sense? Does anyone know what might actually be going on, and what I might do to prevent this?

Thanks in advance for any insights here!

[HansV]

Try the following:
- Quit Word.
- Press Windows key+R to activate the Run dialog.
- Enter or copy/paste the following line:

reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options /v NoReReg /t REG_DWORD /d 1

- Press Enter or click OK.
- Start Word to check whether this has helped.

[Jay Freedman]

If you don't like typing long commands into a small box, you can download the appropriate *.reg file(s) from my page at https://jay-freedman.info/norereg.html.

[DocAElstein]

Hi
Just passing interest…
I had a similar issue for some time: On a older ACER Aspire X3200 with Vista on it from new, I had put Office 2007 on it. All was well.
I think I then got the similar issue after I installed Office 2003 a few years later. Both word versions worked OK after, but on opening Word 2007 I got that thing.
So I just tried wot Hans said, and bingo, the problem went away. Great, thanks!
Thanks also Jay for pasting that link – I was slightly reluctant to mess with things at first, as I was not sure what I was doing, but the explanation there sounded good, so I took the plunge.

( I was so impressed with this amazing feat so early in the morning that I was encouraged to be brave and went into regedit , navigated to where I thought I had been messing, and changed the 1 value to 0 , and Bingo again – the problem came back.

( Very encouraging, I achieved more before my first coffee on Sunday than I did all Saturday trying to get a version of Windows Movie maker working fully on a windows 10 machine.
I had a feeling it was going to be a good day, when it was unusually bright and less gloomy when I got up early this morning, :) ).

Alan

[GeekGirlInFurs]

Belated thanks to HansV and Jay! I was hoping for a solution that would be pretty much exactly this — a simple registry fix. And there it was. With a .reg file all ready to be merged in.