Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Errors caused by corrupted MS Office installation - Trados and XBench

Sometimes Trados refuses to convert or clean-up a document, displaying error message 50202 "due to a OCE/COM or file name error".

There is an article on SDL's web site explaining how to work around this error converting .doc documents to .rtf within MS Word, instead.

The suggested solution works; however, this error message may actually indicate that there is something wrong not in Trados, but in MS Word: some registry setting may have become corrupted.

It happened to me yesterday (I suspect that the actual culprit was the disinstallation and re-installation of McAfee), and I was able to solve the problem by using MS Office setup disk and launch a repair install.

Note that a corrupted MS Office installation may be difficult to diagnose: MS Word was apparently working fine, but I was getting errors in Trados (error 50202) and in XBench, where the QA functions refused to analyze certain Ms Word files, displaying an error message which indicated that a class was not registered.

That error message suggested the key to the solution: to uninstal McAfee I had run a special utility to clean up all traces of McAfee from the registry; when I saw that an error pointed to an unregistered class I suspected that maybe more had been removed from the registry than strictly the McAfee stuff.

So I run the repair install, and both errors disappeared (XBench and Trados).