I just set up a new Vista laptop for my wife. She uses MS Office 2003, and she wanted to change the Office Assistant to "Kitty" instead of Clippy". She kept getting this error message when clicking on the Gallery of Office assistants: "Not enough memory". I know that is bogus, since the machine has three gigabytes of RAM!

After Googling a bit, I finally found the answer on David Overton's blog. The simple solution is to download a file (MS Agent core components) from the Microsoft web site, and install it by hand.

There is one minor trick, which is you can't just click the link to the file (which is shown on David Overton's blog). Strangely, you get an error from the Microsoft web site: "The system cannot find the file specified." As shown in the comments at the end of the blog page, David has the solution: "I right clicked the download link above and saved the file without problem."

After following a few steps, everything works as expected. I was able to change the Office Assistant to "Kitty".

Last modified: November 28, 2011