Article View: comp.sys.mac
Article #30836Re: Application not present
From: Gregory Dudek
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 1988 14:36
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 1988 14:36
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>>trouble is MS Word (3.01). When I try to open its documents (from the
>>finder), I get the "application busy or not available" box. I put Word
>
Response:
>I had this problem several months ago with Excel and MSWord. I could find
>no reasonable explination for it. The final solution was to get out
>my backup copy of MSWord and copy it to the hard disk again. This worked!
>The only thing I could figure is that the copy I had on hard disk must
>have been corrupted even though I could open documents from within Word.
>The same fix worked for Excel. I haven't had any problems since.
>
>Hope it works for you. Let me know if I can give you anymore info.
This has probably been dealt with by now, but since it's such a common
problem I'll risk over-emphasising the point...
The "application not available" problem means the Finder has lost
track of where/what the owner of the given type of document is. The
problem is NOT usually with the application itself, but with the Finder's
desktop file.
One new & insidious way this can happen since system 6.0 is that
if a document's bundle bit is set, it can become the owner of a class
of documents even though the finder will never launch it. i.e. it will
hide the true owning application. This bug was described here a while
ago & I have seen it happen on my own mac since then.
Copying a new version of the application to the disk fixes the problem bacause
the new owner supercedes the old or absent one. Dragginging the application
between folders (& back) might work too, but I haven't tried it.
Gregory Dudek
--
Dept. of Computer Science (vision group) University of Toronto
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.ai.toronto.edu!dudek From: dudek@ai.toronto.edu (Gregory Dudek) Subject: Re: Application not present Message-ID: <88Aug3.115643edt.66@neat.ai.toronto.edu> Organization: University of Toronto, AI group References: <326@intelisc.UUCP> <347@scotty.UUCP> Distribution: comp Date: Wed, 3 Aug 88 10:36:34 EDT