But what he wants to know is how to completely uninstall Office so he can reinstall it. He's having problems with his calendars, and with other aspects of the system, but it looks like his first need is an office reinstall.

First step is to find all (ALL) of your important Outlook files and store them away someplace safe. Read "Where Outlook hides its secret stuff" to learn what to look for.

Then uninstall Office using Add/Remove programs. But here's the big (nasty) surprise. Uninstalling Office doesn't really remove everything. This has annoyed me for years. To make Office uninstall everything, read the last page of "Upgrading to Outlook 2007: It's good. It's bad. It's occasionally ugly!"

Then read the Microsoft Technote How to uninstall the 2007 Office system if you cannot uninstall it by using the "Add or Remove Programs" feature.

Now you can try reinstalling Office.

Exchange hosting and shared email
Stuart also is attempting to share .PST files so he can have shared email and shared calendar.

As for the Calendar sync problem, first off, we never recommend sharing .PST files, so that could cause you the problem. Frankly, based on what Stuart described, he'd probably benefit from a centralized server. Honestly, my big recommendation here is to find himself an Exchange hosting service. You can get online with one for under $10 a month if you shop around, and it should solve all your sync problems.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.