Problem opening newly installed program.

['97ventureowner]

I installed Open Office 2.4 on my son's computer today, ( Dell desktop w/ Windows XP Media Center OS) There were no other programs like this on his computer and my daughter needs something to do her homework with ( reports, etc) with so I decided to download and install it on his computer.
I first went to the site (www.openoffice.org) and downloaded and installed it onto his computer. After I went through installing it and following all the directions in the process, I cannot open the program to use it. After trying for awhile I became frustrated and uninstalled it from the computer. I then went onto my account on his computer where I am the Administrator, thinking that , that might be the problem as he is not an Admin. and I've had issues before with other downloads which cleared up when I used my account. I then re-installed it from the same site and did the same thing only to get the same results .
I then uninstalled it again and went to www.filehippo.com and tried downloading and installing it from that site. Same results.
Everything seems to download and install properly, and as I said before I followed all the directions to the letter. I use the install wizard that appears with the program. After I click finish I thought it said it was start the program automatically, but nothing happens. I go to the desktop and there is an icon for the Open Office program , but when I click on it , a window comes up and tries to re-install the program on my computer. Upon checking in the "Add or Remove programs " section it is listed as being installed, so I don't know why it is trying to re- install the program if it is already on the computer.
Has anyone else had any issues installing this program and if so what did you do to correct it? I don't know of any other way to open this program other than the desktop shortcut placed there by the install. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

[Oz]

Sometimes software seems like it's re-installing when run by a Windows account other than the one that installed it, as the software creates the correct paths under %userprofile%\Application Data\Program and configures it for first use.

You're not really clear on what you're trying to achieve here - are you trying to remove it totally, re-install it or troubleshoot the existing installation?

['97ventureowner]

What I'm trying to achieve is to open the program so that we can use it. My daughter wanted to do a report so she could print it out and I couldn't open the program for her, upon clicking on the desktop icon a window appeared telling me it was starting to install the program.( Which I thought was odd since I seemed to have already successfully installed it.)
This is the first time I've ever encountered something like this after downloading and installing software from the internet. Most of the time I can successfully launch a newly installed program by clicking on the icon for that respective program from the desktop.

[Oz]

It sounds like the program is corrupt or has problem. Can you uninstall it, reboot and reinstall it and see how that goes.

If it appears to be installing again when run under another user account, just leave it for a minute and see if it opens correctly - as I mentioned, it may just be creating the appropriate paths, files and defaults for the alternate Windows profile.

[Moppie]

Just use Google Docs, its basically open office, but online, so no need to install anything.

Should do everything you daughter needs for her homework.

[Neutrino]

might want to give openoffice 3 a try, true its only in beta but it should be stable enough

[Neutrino]

Originally Posted by Neutrino

might want to give openoffice 3 a try, true its only in beta but it should be stable enough

link:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/...ementbeta.html

sorry for the double post but the edit function seems to be broken