Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.ai.toronto.edu!dudek
From: dudek@ai.toronto.edu (Gregory Dudek)
Subject: Re: Application not present
Message-ID: <88Aug3.115643edt.66@neat.ai.toronto.edu>
Organization: University of Toronto, AI group
References: <326@intelisc.UUCP> <347@scotty.UUCP>
Distribution: comp
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 88 10:36:34 EDT

>>trouble is MS Word (3.01).  When I try to open its documents (from the
>>finder), I get the "application busy or not available" box.  I put Word
>
  Response:

>I had this problem several months ago with Excel and MSWord.  I could find
>no reasonable explination for it.  The final solution was to get out
>my backup copy of MSWord and copy it to the hard disk again.  This worked!
>The only thing I could figure is that the copy I had on hard disk must
>have been corrupted even though I could open documents from within Word.
>The same fix worked for Excel.  I haven't had any problems since.
>
>Hope it works for you.  Let me know if I can give you anymore info.

  This has probably been dealt with by now, but since it's such a common
problem I'll risk over-emphasising the point...
  The "application not available" problem means the Finder has lost
track of where/what the owner of the given type of document is.  The
problem is NOT usually with the application itself, but with the Finder's
desktop file. 
  One new & insidious way this can happen since system 6.0 is that
if a document's bundle bit is set, it can become the owner of a class
of documents even though the finder will never launch it.  i.e. it will
hide the true owning application.  This bug was described here a while
ago & I have seen it happen on my own mac since then.
  Copying a new version of the application to the disk fixes the problem bacause
the new owner supercedes the old or absent one.  Dragginging the application
between folders (& back) might work too, but I haven't tried it.

  Gregory Dudek

-- 
Dept. of Computer Science (vision group)    University of Toronto
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