I bought two 32 MB SIMM modules for $40 each at CompUSA with a $40 mail in rebate. That seemed like a pretty good price—remember when a 1 MB SIMM was $40? Unfortunately before I went to CompUSA, I opened up the computer to look at the RAM that was already installed--two 16 MB SIMMs. To get a better look, I took one of them out. Then, when I tried to reinstall it, it wouldn't go in. A little investigation revealed that its socket on the motherboard now had a problem. About five of the 72 metal wires that run parallel to each other along the inside of the socket had sprung up from the bottom of the socket. With a fair amount of force you could insert the SIMM, but when the computer was rebooted it let you know that there was a problem by emitting a collection of loud beeps.

Fortunately I could install the memory I had in the two other sockets on the motherboard, and everything was fine. That meant, however, that I couldn't install any new memory in the two sockets that had been in use before the problem. So I called Gateway, and they offered to send me a new motherboard—not bad for what they thought was a one year warranty on a computer that was over two years old. However, when I convinced them that I actually had a three-year on site warranty, they agreed to send the motherboard with new memory, processor, cache, etc. for a technician to install. Everything was to be exactly like the original.

The technician came, did the installation, and everything worked fine except the network card and the scanner SCSI card. They were conflicting with each other, and he couldn't remove the conflict. I couldn't either--even with an uninstall and reinstall of each item in the Winnows Device Manager. Since I had solved such problems in the past, I told him not to worry about it and sent him on his way to his next appointment. About 15 minutes after he left, I had everything working. There was a BIOS setting for plug & play that was set incorrectly. Once I changed that, the cards were assigned different interrupts (something that couldn't be done earlier), and everything was in good order.

I noticed in MS Access that I no longer had the office assistant working properly—you know the little thing that bounces around on the page, makes noises and is there to assist you--so I reinstalled Access from the CD. That got back the assistant. I then figured I needed to reinstall the two Office 97 patches SR-1 and SR-2. Neither would install. The Sr-1 log file said that it would not install because it encountered incorrect versions of certain files. I figured that I needed to download the newest versions of each patch. After downloading SR-1, it seemed to run fine. I then ran the old version of SR-2 (I hadn't downloaded the new 23 MB version of it yet), and it ran, but seemed to run too quickly to have done much.

Next, when I tried to run Microsoft Word, I received the message that it might have problems due to missing or corrupted files and that I should run the Word installation. Everything seemed to run OK, but to be on the safe side I uninstalled Word and reinstalled it from the Office setup. That solved nothing. Additionally, Access had also lost the ability to import .csv or .txt files, and the Access setup would not allow me to reinstall this feature—saying that it was already installed.

I then decided that there might be a problem with versions of files and not that they were missing or corrupted, so I downloaded SR-2 and the version checker utility and ran both of them. Again SR-2 seemed to go mighty fast. However, the version checker said that I had SR-2 installed and everything was OK. Word still gave the error message about corrupted or missing files, and Access still had its problems.

This was another instance, like I had with Visual Basic 5, where an uninstall and reinstall of a program did not put things right. It seemed impossible to completely remove Word or Office. What do you do when a reinstall will not eliminate the missing file or possible corruption message? I think it was simply a version discrepancy among the SR-1 patch, the SR-2 patch and the original word installation. But how do we wipe the slate clean and start fresh--short of wiping the hard drive clean? Only recently have I run into this type of problem: Uninstalling a program and reinstalling will not fix a problem. It seems that things get stuck in the registry, and you can't get rid of them, and RegClean doesn’t help.

Eraser97.exe to the rescue! Someone on the Office 97 newsgroup suggested a Microsoft utility called Eraser97 that would remove all traces of said program suite, and it certainly does its job. You wouldn’t believe how much a regular uninstall leaves. Eraser97 gets all of that. Unfortunately other programs need some of what it removes.

So far, I have found three programs that had to be reinstalled because of Eraser97: the Active Server Page component for Microsoft Personal Web Server and my two scanners. I also reinstalled WinFax since I at first thought the reason that I couldn’t scan and send from that program was the fault of the program, but, as I discovered, I could use scanners in none of my programs. Unfortunately, reinstalling WinFax probably installed a lot of old DLLs.