The SharePoint newsgroups - and these days the forums - are full of messages from me saying that you should not mix Office 2003 apps with Office 2007 apps on the same client and also making it clear that that applies also to things like Visio and FP/SPD.

So what do you think (almost!) happened when I needed to install SPD 2007 on a new portable I got at work ? Yes, I almost installed it on the portable.

Probably, if in fact I hadn't had problems downloading it from MSDN late yesterday afternoon (when it was impossible in IE7 to even access subscriber downloads), I would have just installed it. I was certainly tired enough by then.

As it was, I was still (relatively!) fresh when that same MSDN site worked fine in the identical Portable and identical IE7 copy this morning and so just as I'd burned a DVD for SPD 2007 and was about to install it, I said to myself "hang on a minute" and didn't.

You see, even though that portable is the first one I have ever had at work that is at least as good as my home machines (well except for the new HP workstation desktop but that doesn't count) and does have 4GB unlike all the previous ones where I always seemed to get one with half the memory I wanted, that NEW (did I say that already) portable had been installed with XPPro (no problems with that) and Office *2003*. [Shakes head and decides not to write any more about that decision.]

So installing SPD 2007 would not have been a good idea. That's for sure.

My choices were the usual ones. Create a VM running a Client OS and install (just) SPD 2007 in that OR upgrade my Office 2003 to Office 2007 and then install SPD 2007.

I chose the second option because at some stage this new PC is going to take over from portable-1 (almost 4 years old), which IS running Office 2007 (again after upgrading from the supplied Office 2003), as my main office machine.

[At that point and when convinced I've not forgotten to move anything from portable-1 I'll probably install Windows Server 2008 on it and use it as a portable (SP 2007) server *without any Office client product installed*. I already am running Windows 2003 and WSS 2.0 (and Office 2003 and FP 2003) on portable-2 (7 years old) so that would match that idea which has been very useful when the occasional WSS 2.0 question comes up.]

So now, finally, I have an Office PC capable of running even a MOSS VM and also where SPD is installed. Time for some further investigation of SPD 2007 I think. The book chapters (of my book) are fine but there's a lot more there I'm sure.