Hi David:
A few ideas-
1) With Office 2007 you can install Office 2007 with the option to keep the previous version of Office with the exception of course being Outlook working. You can do this and then make sure that AC opens with MS Access 2003 (or 2000/2002) by making sure that the file associations are intact. You can likewise open Word with your previous installation since that is what is experiencing the corruption of the Normal template.
2) Make sure that the file extensions are still associated/unassociated (whatever is the case) with 2K7 - Control Panel > Folder Options > File Types and verify who belongs to what. Look at the *.dotm file association in particular.
3) I Googled the problem and found several issues related with msvcr80.dll errors, s.a. with Quickbooks Pro. At first it seemed that the Quickbooks people spoke with MS and supposedly got it resolved in their next release, but then in the QB forum someone stated that things got WORSE. In one instance, the guy was having Outlook crashes, then installed a "Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86)) and well, everything got fixed. It seems to be related to the MS .net framework. (
http://help.wugnet.com/office/XP-pro-Outlook-07-crash-ftopict1068797.html) One QB forum entry mentioned:
"...Something that has often worked is to uninstall Quickbooks, remove all QuickBooks installation directories, or at least rename them. Remove and reinstall .net 1.1 (is possible on Vista Home Premium edition I know), remove and reinstall Visual C++ 2005. Then reinstall Quickbooks..." (
http://quickbooksgroup.com/.ef91d63)
4) One fix was by tweaking an incredible, seemingly unrelated setting: "Problem is due to security settings in Internet Explorer. Open IE and go to Tools > Internet Options then the Security Tab. Set the Internet zone to Medium and set the Local Intrant zone to Medium-low. Try Quickbooks again."
And a follow-up: "The IE Zone changes fixed the error. Please see above post. THANK YOU. Good thing someone here knows what is going on and its not Intuit."
4) Now since you mentioned that the "Ultimate 2007 setup screen appears", if you are still having issuess, you might wish to use the Windows installer cleanup utility located at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301. Unfortunately, you're not supposed to use it on MS Office 2007 installations- you might wish to run this one by the MS folks.
I'm out of ideas for now. The above issues should keep you busy for a while. Please keep us updated! I'm glad that I didn't upgrade to Office 2007 yet! I'll just use my trusty Office 2003 for a while longer.
Cheers,
Al
