The Mac is like a modern day Betamax 1734

Really? I never run MS Office under an administrative account, and I haven't run into any problems that appear to be permissions issues. But maybe I'm attributing the wrong cause to general Office mis- behavior. And I never use spelling checkers (nasty things), so I wouldn't have noticed this particular problem.

I think I'm happier running a crippled Office under a limited- permission account than having the whole thing run with excessive permissions.

On a related subject, I have noticed that some Windows installation programs do not run successfully under administrative accounts other than "Administrator", regardless of membership in the Administrators group or account permissions. Intuit actually documents this as a restriction for Quicken (and here the results are bad: installation doesn't complete, but it leaves the product mostly installed; it doesn't create the entry under Add-Remove Programs, so it can't be uninstalled, but it can't be reinstalled either, because it thinks it has to be uninstalled first; it has to be removed from the Registry manually).

While things have gotten better since NT4 - where it was nearly impossible to do anything useful without admin privileges - Windows apps are still often very bad about handling non-privileged accounts. And privileged apps often do marvelously stupid things, as the sordid history of attacks against "interact with desktop" services attests, for example.

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As always, great patience and a clean work area are required for fulfillment of this diversion, and it should not be attempted if either are compromised. -- Chris Ware