Ofiice 2007, Outlook 2003 and the MAPi32.DLL battle

A week ago i raved about the new Office Ultimate 2007 version in my office. In spite of the organization possessing the license for nearly 1 year, none had it on their machines. I was the proud owner of the first copy of the entire suite of Office 2007 with its latest software tools. I flaunted its features through my works on and off, especially with the new One Note 2007 drawing seamless pictures and tables with clean organization of data and a pleasurable experience to use. I simply ignored the product key pop-ups since our licensed one didn't seem to work, and every time it came up (now a regular visitor on my desktop nearly 5 times a day!), it was a spam on my nerve!
Until yesterday - the spam was no longer an unwelcome intruder - it suddenly morphed into an scary Vader type villain invading my entire Office 2007 suite and locking all the functions of the Office 2007 software. i was helpless! And was more importantly stuck with knowledge i could only see, but not touch, feel or play around with - it was lifeless!!

After much trying, pleading and battling with Office 2007, i gave up. To its predecessor. Office 2003. Microsoft assures you that there is no backward compatibility of OneNote 2007 files in OneNote 2003. Then came another problem once Office 2003 was installed. While opening Outlook 2003, this error occurred: mapi32.dll file is corrupt or it's the wrong version. My team mate from systems struggled for nearly an hour uninstalling and installing Outlook 2003 version, but to no avail. A 5 min search for the solution on Google yielded this:-

OL2000: ErrMsg: MAPI32.DLL is Corrupt or the Wrong Version

and the resolution for this is:-

1.	Quit Outlook.
2.	Click Start, point to Find, and then click Files or Folders.
3.	Type Mapi32.dll in the Named box.
4.	In Look In, click to select My Computer, and click Find Now.
5.	Right-click to select Mapi32.dll in the search results list.
6.	Click Rename, type Mapi32.old, and press ENTER to accept the name change. If there are multiple copies of Mapi32.dll in the list, rename each.
7.	Close the Find Files window and start Outlook.

there's one more step, however, which my systems' person performed, which is the critical factor. He renamed another file names MSAPI.dll to .old, and then Outlook 2003 started working.

time spent earlier: 1 hr
time spent to resolve after searching: 5 mins

what more to say? Search before you research!!