Running Access 97 on Windows 7

Today I had to get Access 97 running on a Windows 7 64bit PC. When I arrived on site, my colleague had already successfully installed Office 97, and the SR-1 patch (sr1off97.exe). So I guess that the well known "Hatten" file issue had already been resolved.

 "There is no license" error message starting Microsoft Access
 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/141373

On further investigation, I found that an attempt to install the SR-2 patch had failed, and also that the on-line help for Access 97 was not working at all. And I could see that the "Programming help" file had not been installed.

To install "Programming help", I ran the maintenance setup, but it soon failed, reporting message "Setup Error 825 - Object 9807". This issue is covered by the Microsoft support Article ID: 156638

 OFF97: International English SR-1 Patch Offpro97.inf
 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/156638

Basically, you need to download file "offpro97.exe" and extract from that the file "off97pro.inf" and copy it across to the 'setup' directory, replacing the existing file.

To get the help working, you need to install support for "winhelp32.exe".
This issue is covered by the Microsoft support Article ID: 917607

 I cannot open Help files that require the Windows Help (WinHlp32.exe) program
 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917607

But then when you try to use the Access 97 help files, you will get error "There was a problem running the macro. (1037)". The fix for this is covered in the same Microsoft support article.

Basically, you need to run "C:\WINDOWS\syswow64\regedit32.exe" and create key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WinHelp" and then create DWORD "AllowProgrammaticMacros" and set it to value "1".

In order to install the SR-2 patch (sr2bof97.exe), you need to replace some of the Windows 7 font files, with older versions copied from Windows XP. These are the font files, from Windows XP, that I used:

17/07/2004  11:39   127,596 comic.ttf
29/08/2002  13:00   111,476 comicbd.ttf
21/11/1996  00:00    41,408 hatten.ttf
17/07/2004  22:55   383,140 tahoma.ttf
17/07/2004  22:55   355,436 tahomabd.ttf

Finally, I installed file "Jet35sp3.exe" to make sure the Jet Engine was at the final version.

Ok, so that's it. I tried testing a few things with Access 97, and it seems to run fine on Windows 7.