Access 2000 and Access 2007 on the same PC

We've always had problems getting different versions of Access to coexist on the same PC. Technically we know how to do it but there are always problems. Chief amongst these is the background worry that the bug we're trying to resolve is actually just a side-effect of there being another version of Access loaded on the same machine and they're fighting over DLLs or other resources.

The solution we've found is to run Access 2000 on a virtual machine. We installed Oracle's VirtualBox software then loaded Windows 2000 into a new virtual machine.

We've now got a clean version of Access 2000 on the virtual machine and it's in an environment where everything is of the same vintage. It's got the rest of Office 2000 on the machine so we no longer suffer from the problems we used to get when Access 2000 would complain about trying to load a Windows 7 support library.

VirtualBox can be downloaded from http:www.virtualbox.org

Oracle's VirtualBox allows multiple virtual machines on the same PC. We've got one running Ubuntu and another with the beta version of Windows 8. The evaluation version of Windows 8 is time-limited but that's not going to be a problem. When the licence expires we'll just delete the whole virtual machine. So much easier than having to unistall it or reformat the drive.