I am trying to resolve a PC problem for a relative. He is running Windows 7 and MS Office 2010 - I believe that both are the 64 bit versions.


Pretty much whenever he presses a key in MS Office 2010 the following MsgBox appears:

"Please wait while setup prepares the necessary files"

Followed in quick succession without intervention from him by:

"Configuring Microsoft Preofessional 2010"

At this point he hits the Red X "Close" button and it asks:

"Are you sure you want to cancel setup?"

Sometimes he gets a MsgBox reading:

"In order to complete setup a system reboot is necessary. Would you like to reboot now?"

Regardless of whether or not he reboots, the problem persists.


If he allows it to run to completion it reboots the PC but reappears when he opens Outlook again. This also happens with Word and Excel.

He has had (and used) MS Office 2010 for about five years - so for quite some time. This problem started about a month ago. First he thought it was just 'updating' things - but then it just went on and on.

He has Googled the problem and attempted the KB 2528748 Microsoft Support fix without any joy. He has also tried running CCleaner.

Can anyone offer any ideas as to how he can get round this wretched situation? I have suggested that he should stop using MS Office and instead use Apache's OpenOffice or LibreOffice but having used MS Office for more than 25 years he still manages to swear by (rather than at) Microsoft.

TIA