Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!littlei!intelisc!rudolph
From: rudolph@intelisc.UUCP (David Rudolph)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Application not present
Message-ID: <331@intelisc.UUCP>
Date: 7 Aug 88 04:41:24 GMT
References: <326@intelisc.UUCP> <347@scotty.UUCP> <88Aug3.115643edt.66@neat.ai.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: rudolph%isc.intel.com (David Rudolph)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Intel Scientific Computer, Beaverton, OR
Lines: 43

In article <88Aug3.115643edt.66@neat.ai.toronto.edu> dudek@ai.toronto.edu (Gregory Dudek) writes:
>>>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:
>
>>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 "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

Since there have been so many replies my initial posting, I just wanted to
clarify some things.  Several people suggested copying a floppy version of
Word to the hard disk.  I must have neglected to mention it, but I had tried
this to no avail.  Moving the Word file back and forth between folders also
had no effect.  Postings such as Greg's above suggest that some document's
bundle bit may have been set.  But in the original posting, I noted that
double clinking on any Word document would successfully open a version of
Word on a floppy - just not the one copied to the HD.  Would this be the
case if a document had the bundle bit problem?
  Also, since this was a new hard disk and I was just copying my
applications and docs to it for the first time, it seems unlikely that bits
had already been perverted.  In fact, I erased _all_ Word-related files and
recopied my 2 800K Word floppies to the HD and still had the same problem.
  In the end, the only solution that worked was rebuilding the desktop.

-- 
David Rudolph           CSnet: rudolph%isc.intel.com