Office 2007 - Act 3 - Visio

The journey continues. I tried to open a Visio document. Sure enough, it opens fine. Then a little dialog opens up indicating that Windows Installer, then Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, were configuring Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007. It runs for about 15 seconds, and disappears.

Fine, I've seen that happen before, in a couple of my previous lives, with a couple or three previous Office incarnations.

But now I click on my Visio diagram, and it "thunks" at me. Thunk - you know that pseudo-beep that is so pleasantly annoying when you click on the main window when there's a dialog open, that is supposed to inform you that you can't do what you want? Yeah, Visio is thunking me.

I try a few things. I click on the Visio icon in the taskbar. Voila! Now the window shows the Active color set. I click on the scrollbar and "thunk". Apparently all clicking on the taskbar does is alternate between the Active and Inactive color schemes. I can't do another thing with the window - not even move it. Right-clicking on the taskbar icon doesn't do anything special either - no context menu, just makes the window look like it is active. Liar.

I close everything else down, trying to find the hidden dialog box. No luck. I open up "Task Manager". I don't see anything unrecognizable in the process list. I select it in the Applications tab and click on "Switch To" - thunk. I click on my "Show Desktop" quick-link. Everything disappears, including Visio. Click again, it's back.

I got it. It's unresponsive. Well, at least "End Task" works.

My buddy the desktop technician got involved at this point. All it took to fix me up was an install of the next version of Visio - I had been using Visio 2000, now I'm on Visio 2003.