Anilrgowda

Question: I would like to know this. Basically, I have a quad-boot system with three different versions of Windows and also Linux. I've installed MS Office 2007 on my MS Vista partition, but when trying to run WINWORD.EXE on my Windows XP partition, it won't work. I receive the error message: "This operating system is not presently configured to run this application."

Is there a way to run my MS Office from my Vista partition without having to reinstall it on my XP partition, thus taking up hard drive space? I'm assuming it would entail adding registry keys? Could I take my registry keys from my Vista boot and export them to a USB, and then import them into my XP boot? If so then which keys? Just throwing out ideas here.

Wondering if anyone has ever tried this. Please provide step-by-step details or at least a link which does.

Anilrgowda

Okay - I should have pointed out that my comments were opinion based - but I have personally experienced problems with this and similar software- usage from a single installation on separate partitions - and not just with Microsoft products. I have tried this a lot in the past - because I have always thought that if, for some reason or another, you have a couple of different but compatible OS's on your workstation (i.e. W2k and XP), then it makes sense to only install and activate Office once, surely...

BUT:

The first thing to say is - I have in the past tried this extensively - but not a lot, granted, with Office 2007 (I have tried running a single installation of Office 2007 BTR2 on only 3 different workstations - each one running WinXP, Vista RC1 and SuSE 10.1 - and although I could run Office 2007 from both M$t OS's - I found that, on duplication, I occassionally got "Microsoft Office has recovered from a Serious error, and needs to close etc... - and a Detect and Repair was the only way to fix the problem - but upon multiple reboots and reuse between each OS - the problem reappeared.

I have considerably more experience with doing this on W2k and XP, with both Office XP (2002) and Office 2003. The results were better, granted - and less problems were faced with running a single Office installation on both OS's when dual-booting - as this was with more stable software - more patched up etc., but occassionally I did face some issues - mainly "This operating system is not presently configured to run this application" as mentioned above. A few registry tweaks fixed this - mainly deleting some of the relevant Application Data\Microsoft folders.

Overall - I can say that to answer the Asker's questions:

@JOSHSKORN "Could I take my registry keys from my Vista boot and export them to a USB, and then import them into my XP boot?"

No! This cannot be done - only a reinstallation will work (possibly)

I hope that I have explained myself properly.