Hi Ted,

If the suite wasn't a trial, there should be a product key for it somewhere - perhaps stuck on the PC's case. It may be that, before selling the PC to you, your buddy re-initialized it without re-activating Office. Please bear in mind that I don't have access to your PC or its history.

Other than that, the only thing I can suggest that might reinstate Office for you is either a System Restore or a System Recovery, as the the second link I gave you.

A System Restore will take the PC back to an earlier state. Choose the right restore point and it'll be restored to the state it was in before the problem update. A System Recovery will re-initialize the system via its recovery partition, including reinstalling any software the PC came with. You would probably still have to activate Office under such a scenario, though, and this requires the product key.

If you do decide to install Open Office, be aware that it is not fully compatible with Office. If you don't exchange files with MS Office users a great deal, though, this may be of little consequence.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]