WE'VE SPENT THREE DAYS rescuing our dual-processor G4, and it seems to be smooth as butter again, except that we cannot run Microsoft Office. The program quits upon cursor point insertion. Makes it tough to finish writing the book.
        We've removed all traces of MS Office and iTunes from our system, reinstalled the OS, installed the Power Mac G4 AGP update, run Virex, Disk Warrior, and TechTool Pro 3, reblessed the Finder, removed all preferences and rebuilt them from scratch, removed the old SCSI scanner and all SCSI connections, fixed damaged FOND resources in our type library, checked our USB connections, rebuilt the desktop twice, zapped PRAM twice. Software and hardware check out okay.
        But when we reinstall a clean, fresh copy of MS Office, the entire system goes to hell, and Word docs sent to colleagues are corrupted and unreadable. We've tried disabling Quicktime (didn't help), tried disabling Suitcase and Dragthing (didn't help), re-performed all the steps listed above (none helped).
        Now, we can write and we can spell. We'd be perfectly happy writing in Tex-Edit, BBEdit, or Eudora if we had to. But clients, editors, and publishers rely on Word, backend folks and clients rely on Excel, and without operating versions of these products we can't do our job.
        Fortunately we're seeing the dentist this afternoon. He's going to be drilling and hammering on our skulls for at least an hour. It will make a nice break from all this. — 22 January 2001

P.S. MacFixit notes, in an unconfirmed report: "Virus vendors have come across a new problem that propagates itself when a Melissa.W virus is 'fixed'—a new strain of the virus is left behind to do damage. Whoever wrote the virus is brighter than previous authors, and knew the path of repair, and wrote code to propagate a new virus from the old. All the vendors know of this, and are working feverishly for a fix." This may be what we're up against. More information is available from MacFixit as it unfolds.