My desktop computer had a minor meltdown last night. About a week ago I installed Office 2007 professional on the desktop. I'd been running it for a couple months without incident on my laptop and I figured: "Why not?"

Yes, that would be a mistake.

The installation was uneventful until about 2/3 of the way through when the installer notified me that it had encountered an error and was rolling back all the changes. "That's good programming," I thought as the progress bar reversed itself.

Once it was finished "rolling back" the changes I discovered that it had indeed replaced all of the Office 2003 programs with their Office 2007 counterparts. This was obviously a form of "to roll back" with which I was unfamiliar.

Anyway, the new programs all worked fine, until last night. For no apparent reason an installation window popped up and next thing I knew the Outlook 2007 had been uninstalled. I tried just running the installer again to add the program back, but no dice. For some reason it absolutely would not allow me to install Outlook again. I also couldn't successfully uninstall the Office 2007 suite.

Long story short, I ended up completely restoring a 1 1/2-week old backup that was thankfully pre-Office 2007 installation. I'll install Office 2007 when I upgrade my computer -- in a year or two.

At this point I would also like to offer a heartfelt endorsement of Acronis TrueImage backup software. It worked like a charm.