Microsoft Office 2004 - 11.5.6

For some strange reason, the update deleted Excel. I only had Word and Excel installed. Had to reinstall from CD and do a couple updates to get back to 11.5.6 (first to 11.5.5, then to 11.5.6), but it worked the second time. Not sure what happened.

Tried with safe boot and normal boot both ways it just quits responding.

My problem is not limited to version 11.5.5, but goes back over a year and to earlier versions of Office Word 2004. I have found a few others with the same problem, notably gmartin on this site.
I type in French. To create an accented character I hit the option key and the letter to be accented. 99% of the time no problem, but once in a long while (and then pretty consistently over a period of days or weeks) Word freezes when I do this. Can't save. If I go to the Finder, can't get back into Word. Must Force Quit and lose recent changes. All other applications fine. This is unspeakably annoying, and clearly others DO have the problem, is there no solution? Gmartin, have you found one?

I should add that I have changed computers and keyboards during this time and have clean reinstalled Office 2004. MacBook Pro, OSX 10.5.7. Many thanks for any suggestions!

Over the past couple of weeks, I have run the Office 11.5.4 update on a few iMac (PPC) running Mac OS X 10.4.11 having problems after updating to Office 11.5.4 -- it turns out that for non-admin users, Word, in particular, becomes subject to crashing or spinning wheel of death until the app is forced quit... so, if you are Admin user,it may not matter but if you have users that are not admins then beware...

I have not determined why there is an issue with this update - I do believe that Microsoft has actually done a very good job with support to Mac Office up until Office 2004 rev 11.5.3 and along with Open XML Converter it has address the issues with the new format, introduce with Office 2007 (.docx, pptx, .xlsx). NeoOffice or Apple's iWork are now reasonable alternatives to the pricey MS Office - does Microsoft remember (or not) that they used a similar strategy against WordPerfect and won! market share will continue to erode at these price points.

As with another recent update (I think it was v11.5.1, but I'm not certain about that), Microsoft has again managed to break Excel relative to the previous version. This time, Excel v11.5.4 displays a prompt stating that it is unable to save the AutoRecover information, and gives me the option of choosing not to repeat the prompt again. But it doesn't matter whether I want to repeat it or not, because clicking on the "OK" button that dismisses the prompt is useless; it doesn't work. No amount of clicking, or hitting any combination of keys will get rid of the prompt. Meanwhile, the current document is grayed out, as are menu functions...including Save. The only way to restore normal functionality to Excel is to force quit the app.

Naturally, that means that every bit of work I've done since the last time I saved will be lost. Nice Smeagol...er, I mean nice Microsoft; always helps!

I have no way of knowing whether this is some kind of an anomalous behavior of my particular instance of Excel, or whether it shows up for other users. If you haven't run the updater yet, be advised that v11.5.4 is already problematical for at least one user. Too bad; in general I love Excel. I use it daily, and I'd be lost without it. That's why it's such an irritation when Microsoft breaks it.