I am looking for a way to reliably detect (in the Registry) the installation of Word'97 so I can use its spell-checker in my app. The best suggestion I have seen so far is to use the app associated with .doc via the code at the bottom of this post. The downside

 declare long FindExecutable in "shell32.dll" ;
 string cFile, string cDirectory, string @cResult
 cBuffer = space(255)
 nRetVal =
 FindExecutable("testit.doc",getenv('temp') , @cBuffer)
 if nRetVal < 32
   messageBox("You don't have Word installed.",64,;
    'File Opening Problem')
   return
 endif

The problem is that if a user has the Word Viewer installed, it will still return true; the same could be said if someone has WordPro installed....