There’s no doubt that since I installed SP3 for Office 2003 my Vista PC has started behaving oddly.

Outlook keeps stalling for up to 20 seconds at a time as does IE7, which additionally stalls completely sometimes. I’ve ended up several times starting another instance of IE7 and once even a third instance of IE7, while Vista thinks about what it wants to do next. And this is day one with SP3. When IE7 has jammed itself shut I have to use Task Manager to abandon the process, after which Vista always helpfully pops up a window that it is looking for a solution to the problem. Which it never does as the problem keeps happening. Is Microsoft in a headlong rush to turn all our operating systems into junk?

Office 2003 is very bound in with the operating system and I assume with Vista probably more so than with the older XP. On my Vista PC I have the full version of Office 2003, which contains Word, Access, Excel, Publisher, Powerpoint, Outlook, Infopath (What the heck is that? Ed) and Office Tools. What would happen if I uninstalled the whole Office suite? Is there any chance of Vista still working after a load of its guts have been removed? Probably would work OK as Microsoft would have tested that scenario.

But what if we ran some devious little tests such as removing individual Office applications one at a time, with reboots in between. Even worse than that, what about if you removed Outlook, Access, Powerpoint and Excel, with the reboots in between and then started reinstalling some of these applications one at a time. What chance of Vista staying stable after that.

Of course you could get smart and knock up a whole load of test scenarios with the installation, uninstall and reinstallation of Office applications in various orders with a whole load of decent expected results and it would be a good testing exercise, but don’t expect me to do it.

Someone, somewhere in the World has probably done one or some of these test scenarios but not as a test but as a real necessary action. Wonder what happened?