Recently I tried to deploy one of my prototypes on another machine. The functionality of the prototype was quite simple: Hold a predefined object in front of your webcam and the system starts an according presentation on the screen. Not sure if this is really useful for anything but I did something similar with printed photos. Whenever I held a printed photo in front of my webcam the system tries to find the digital equivalent on my computer. If a photo is recognized the according directory is opened in the file explorer and the photo is selected.
However, when I tried to use the PowerPoint Viewer 2007 to open presentations it didn’t worked. When I tried to start the PowerPoint Viewer it instantly exited. It took me a while to find a solution for this behaviour. It is somehow related to a bug described in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. The described cause is:
“This issue occurs when you have a non-English version of Microsoft Office or of PowerPoint Viewer installed on a computer that has an English version of Microsoft Windows installed.”
(by the way is that really a cause or rather an excuse?)
I run a German Windows XP and I tested the PowerPoint Viewer on at least three other computers with a German XP. Maybe the described “cause” is just wrong because the following solution worked very well for me:
Go to the directory: C:\Programme\Microsoft Office\Office12
Copy the folder which is located in that directory and rename it to 1033