I was hoping someone here might be able to help me.

I'm looking at a MacBook Pro for a client of mine as a favor to another client (they know I'm not very experienced with Macs). The problem they're having is that none of the Microsoft Office applications will launch. When I first turn the computer on and click on the Word icon in the dock, it'll bounce for a while (about 10 seconds) and then stop without anything happening. If I click on it again, it will bounce once and nothing happens. If I click on another application like Excel, it'll bounce a couple times and stop, and then every other time it'll bounce once then stop.

The MacBook is running 10.7.5 and Office 2008. I don't have the installation discs for Office.

There's not a lot of information on this type of problem, but I've tried several of the suggestions I've found.

- ran a disc repair by booting into the Disk Utility
- ran "repair disc permissions"
- removed relevant plist files to make the program recreate them
- I even went through validating the fonts

So far I've struck out. I just can't get the application to launch. Any suggestions?