As I have said before, I spent a lot of time as a project manager, so I feel a little naked without Microsoft Project somewhere around me. I bought 2003 Standard when I was forced to stop working, and thus use a client’s copy of Project. I used it occasionally to plan things that needed some logistics; as an example, I planned the MS 150 Bike Tour, a charity event in my area. It did occasionally come in handy.

Somewhere across the course of the last few years, I had to replace a disk drive. The old one was partitioned into two drives: K and L. That had been kind of a pain anyway, so I did not partition the new one. I just let it be 250GB of L:/. That worked fine until I was unable to open a project file sent to me by a friend who needed help. I had not applied the SP3 upgrade for Project, which has those filters.

So I set off to do that. I went to the MS Project site and downloaded the up grade. However, it would not even get a real good start before it told me it could not find drive K. Oops. I know it was not on drive K before, but I may have had the default MPP file directory pointed to a directory on K. I went through the registry, and everything else, looking for and removing all instances of K:. Shaking my head, I saw the need to uninstall Project and reinstall it.

The uninstall went just fine. However, when I tried to reinstall it, I got an error message saying that it was still installed. So I went around and cleaned up any possible leftover Project items from my drives, and then from my registry. That did not help. It still thought it was there. So I went to the MS Project Home Page and found the email support link in the tiny print at the bottom. They are very big on selling you the product but not very good about providing support.

I started through the email support wizard. I finally got to the part where I needed to enter some esoteric product number. The wizard would be happy to look for the number, but I had already uninstalled the program. The other option was to run the program and look on the Help  About screen. But, of course (say it with me, here) I had already uninstalled the program and could not do that. Those were the only two options for finding that number, and without that number I could not get support. No exceptions.

So, once again, I have been bent over in the corner by brother Microsoft. I paid for it. They failed (obviously) to properly uninstall it with their very own uninstaller. But I cannot get support because they screwed up, without paying $50 for it. They are so large, and so callous, that it is no longer possible to work with them.

Linux, here I come.