Instead of installing the full Oracle Client plus ODBC drivers, you can use Oracle "Instant Client" plus Instant Client ODBC supplement.  Setting it up is not intuitively obvious, so here's what I did.  Note that you do NOT need a tnsnames.ora or a sqlnet.ora.

Sometimes, Microsoft Office will demand the Office CD,even though it has already been installed.  This usually happens when you start an Office application.

In the particular case of MS Project 2003, it may tell you that it can't find sku03a.cab, but with different Office applications, different files will be demanded.

I'd like to have a zero-install, Windows, virtual machine environment.  In theory, this would let me run my OS and desktop environment on any Windows computer, without installing the VM software.

When running VirtualBox with a Windows XP client, I ran into a problem where it worked fine before I installed the Virtual Box Client Drivers, and then, any mouse movement resulted in the mouse pointer moving slowly down and to the right.  It turns out this is a known VirtualBox conflict with the SMS mouse driver. (SMS allows the Windows domain managers to manage your PC, including remote control.)

So I uninstalled SMS.  Problem NOT cured.

So I checked Device Manager.  SMS Mouse Driver does not appear.

1. Open a command prompt
2. set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
3. devmgmt.msc
4. In Device Manager, click View/Show Hidden Devices in the menu