OFF97: Assistant Appears Twice in Office Assistant Gallery

• Microsoft Office 97 for Windows

SYMPTOMS

In a Microsoft Office 97 program, when you browse through the Office Assistant Gallery, some assistants may appear twice.

CAUSE

This problem may occur if the following conditions are true:

• You have rerun the Microsoft Office 97 Setup program in maintenance mode and selected the Reinstall option.

  -and-

• You have previously activated any Office Assistant character other than Clippit, the paper clip.

WORKAROUND

To eliminate duplicate assistants from the Office Assistant Gallery, follow these steps:

1. In a Microsoft Office 97 program, right-click the Office Assistant window, and click Assistant on the shortcut menu.

2. Click the Gallery tab.

3. Use the Back and Next buttons to move to the first (leftmost) instance of the assistant whose duplicate you want to eliminate.

4. Click OK.

If the assistant that appears twice is the active assistant, switch to another one, and then follow the steps above.

If the above steps do not work, follow these steps to manually delete the duplicate assistant:

1. Exit all of the Microsoft Office 97 programs.

2. Using the Windows Explorer, go to the following folder on your hard disk:

         C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Actors
   

3. Each assistant's name should appear only once: either with an .acp extension, or with an .act extension. If an assistant's name appears twice (for example: Powerpup.act and Powerpup.acp), right-click the .acp file for that assistant, and click Delete on the shortcut menu.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. We are researching this problem and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.

MORE INFORMATION

When you first install Microsoft Office 97 on a computer, the following Microsoft Office Assistant files are installed into the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Actors folder on your hard disk:

   File Name      File Type
   --------------------------------------------
   Clippit.act    Office Assistant Actor file
   Dot.acp        Office Assistant Preview file
   Genius.acp     Office Assistant Preview file
   Hoverbot.acp   Office Assistant Preview file
   Logo.acp       Office Assistant Preview file
   Mnature.acp    Office Assistant Preview file
   Powerpup.acp   Office Assistant Preview file
   Scribble.acp   Office Assistant Preview file
   Will.acp       Office Assistant Preview file

When you use the Microsoft Office Assistant Gallery to switch to a different Office Assistant, such as PowerPup, the .act file for that assistant (Powerpup.act) is installed and the .acp preview file for the assistant (Powerpup.acp) is removed.

When you run the Microsoft Office 97 Setup program in maintenance mode and select the Reinstall option, Setup reinstalls files that are no longer present. Using the above example, the Setup program reinstalls the Powerpup.acp file, since it is no longer present and you now have both Powerpup.acp and Powerpup.act installed on your hard disk.

If the .acp and .act files for an assistant are both installed at the same time, the character is displayed twice in the Office Assistant Gallery. To eliminate this problem, use the workaround to remove the .acp file for the specific assistant.