Office 2008 says all your files are belong to user 502

Office 2008, you wascallay wabbit. As if you weren’t causing enough trouble by mucking with Spaces, now it looks like your installer is up to some hijinks of its own. It seems that the installer for the latest version of the productivity suite grants ownership of its files to user id 502—who, you may ask, is user 502? That’s just it: that user id is assigned to the second user created in OS X. Oftentimes, that’s just a standard user account, not an administrator account: on my system, it’s assigned to a clean test user.

So what does user 502 win, Johnny? Well, Bob, they get full ownership of //Library/Fonts/Microsoft, /Library/Application Support/Microsoft, /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008, and /Library/Automator (if it isn’t already there). Furthermore, all those files are also set to executable. Just for kicks.

While Microsoft’s MacBU has acknowledged the problem, some have also pointed to it as a problem with Apple’s Package Maker, which Microsoft has adopted for the first time with Office 2008. You can try running Repair Permissions in Disk Utility to see if it changes the permissions to the correct settings, but we’re not totally sure if that’ll fix all the problems or not.