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Hey y'all~

Open a terminal and use this command:

sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8

Thanks for the quick reply. I entered the command you listed and the reply I got said that there were "0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 9 to remove and 0 not upgraded" packages. Which suggests to me that the package was already installed.

Well, it said more than that, I can say that for sure. It would have specifically told you if it was already installed, or couldnt find it, or something like that. Read the output a little more. Its in there.

Maybe:

sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.6 python-wxglade

I cannot remember off the top of my head which particular package it requires. lol. Those should correct the issue. If not, it may be something I am missing. I have all 3 installed on my system at the moment.

Oh yes, it definitely said more than that. I don't remember if it said that the package was already installed or not. Sorry, I should have been more thorough.

I installed the other two packages. I'll let you know if it fails again or not.

Thanks!

Sweet. That should work. If im not mistaken, those packages are for drawing graphics on the screen (glade and gtk). Let us know it it works for you. :)

It's still failing. I'll go to open an Excel or Word document and the splash screen appears, stays for a little while and then disappears saying that either Excel or WinWord.exe has encountered a problem.

Hmmmm. Are you running this from the script from PlayOnLinux or trying to do a manual install?

Also, have you thought about using a native office program, like LibreOffice or OpenOffice, in place of MS Office? I stopped using MS Office suite years ago, when I switched to open office. It can save to and read MS Office files. I was even opening and editing powerpoint files in OpenOffice with no issues. Even all of the transitions were the same.

Just make sure that you know there are options. :)

I'm running it from PlayOnLinux and I did the install routine through PlayOnLinux as well. It's worked perfectly for me in the past, it just seems that since I reinstalled Xubuntu on my machine it's been flaky and unpredictable.

I have thought about using LibreOffice/OpenOffice - there are some features that Microsoft Word has that neither of those two have that I need for collaborating with other folks on projects. In my experience both of the native Office suites did a much messier job of handling the documents I collaborate on than it does on an emulated Microsoft Office.

I hear that. Ive worked in Enterprise environments before, so I know what thats like.

Perhaps, just as a test, try a different WM? Maybe there is an issue with XFCE displaying correctly (though I have not heard of such an issue).

So I tried a different window manager on my laptop (which was having the same issue). I installed LXDE and it seems to be working fine. I've closed and re-opened multiple Word and Excel documents and they've opened every time. I did get an error message when I first installed LXDE that said Office 2010 was unable to activate - perhaps that's part of the problem?

I don't really like LXDE very much, so if there's something that I can do in XFCE to make it work better I'd really appreciate the help.

Thanks!

I should also mention that I'm running XFCE 4.10 on both machines that are having the problems

If you its doing it on both machines, both running xfce, then that is your problem. Im not sure how to go about fixing it. Have you tried asking around the xfce forums (if there are any) or xubuntu forums?

I posted on the ubuntu forums, so far no one has replied to my message. If you have any additional ideas I'm all ears.

Thanks so much for your help :)

As I stated, its an XFCE problem. Not a bug in POL, per se.

I have to assume, you didnt try another window manager, did you??

Yes, I did...and it worked. Sorry, I thought that I'd mentioned that. So you're right, it must be a problem with XFCE. Hopefully they have a decent response for me. For now, I'm stuck using Office 2007 which doesn't seem to have the same problem.

Word.
Options at this point:

Use an open-source alternative (libreoffice, openoffice)
use a different version of office (which you are currently doing)
Open a bug with XFCE, though, im not sure how for it would go, considering its for a wine issue.