Just my observations.....I am retired and use MS Office for my personal use only after many years in the business world. I have been using the 2003 version for many years and have been very happy with it. I could do any and everything I wanted to without any thought. I had to purchase a new computer that came with Windows 7 and find that the 2003 version of MS Office is not compatible and I am FORCED to upgrade to 2010. It is definitely different and has a learning curve to it. Now I have to spend a lot of time finding how to do what I used to do with no thought. I wish I didn't HAVE to but the "powers that be" (Microsoft) do not allow you to have a choice, they force you to change whether you want to or not, whether you NEED to or not. Point being, whether you want to or not, eventually you are going to HAVE to upgrade. Your only decision is: now or later. Good luck!

Found this at another forum. Thought I'd share. I updated/upgraded five machines from XP and Vista to Windows 7. I did the "clean" install on each. I use Office 2007 and the upgrades seemed to keep most all of my stuff. I have not found anything missing. Just for info, I backed up those directories/folders/files first, just in case. So far the the only thing that has failed to work for me (my wife actually) is an old Windows 98/XP Typing instruction program. I think that is because I did the upgrades on both desktops to 64bit, up from 32bit. Also just for info, just a couple of weeks ago I downloaded and installed the beta for Office 2010. It seems to be going very well also. Wonder if he used the OEM or the Retail version??? Think I'll ask! Thanks folks! In no hurry here, so keep the info coming. bbbluz

I would have removed Office 2000 first so that I get a squeaky clean install of Office 2007. Why start with a possibly muddied environment? At some point during the install of Office 2007 you are prompted to insert the Office 2000 CD verifying you are entitled to upgrade. When the install offered to browse for the old office it was looking for your CD which you would place in the drawer at that point. I do not believe just pointing to the folder was good enough, you needed to point to the executable file if you preferred that route to offering the original CD.

Thanks for the thoughts, I think it is not resource overload, and I'm using only the XP home firewall, pretty transparent I understand. I'm running on a recent Gateway Notebook, in this case and on a recent Dell Desk Top in the other, the DT has no problems. I will admit my Gateway does have some difficulties on Com1 (simulated via USB, of course). I'm still using dial-up and it uses Com1, as does my Palm Z22 sync connection. I can not run both at the same time for that reason. Further, and Gateway did send me a prepaid shipping carton to send the Notebook back for repair as the dial-up will establish only one connection per boot. When I hang up the phone line, I have to reboot to get it to work again. I'm about to go DSL here and decided not to send the Notebook in, loss of data and a lot of other concerns being top of my reason for living with the Com1/Dial-up problem. I suppose this could reflect back into my new MS Office problem The installation of MS Office was a purchase DVD. The Notebook did come with Office 2007 ready to install, but I uninstalled that some time back as I was using Open Office, need commercial use. So, Gateway believes the machine has enough resources to run Office 2007. I can take a look to see what's going on with the resources when in the stuck-state. As noted, Control/Alt/Del will not allow me to kill Word, for example, also I note Work knows it is in trouble and tries to send an error report to MS, I think it sometimes succeeds sometimes doesn't. The only way I can get Work (or PP, or Excel) to release is to hang up the Dial up. I may try a reinstall, but am reluctant as I have still to update Office via the Dial-up, about two hours of download time.