esttab estimations results do not have e(b) and e(V) - stata

Question

I have been using the estout commands for quite some time now, but am now working on a couple of computers that are not connected to the internet. I have been getting the following error from the esttab command:
current estimation results do not have e(b) and e(V)
To test this with a simpler example, I tried to replicate the example here: http://repec.org/bocode/e/estout/estpost.html#estpost101
I created a sample dataset as below:
price mpg rep78 foreign
1 3 1 1
2 3 1 1
3 3 1 2
4 3 2 3
5 3 2 5
6 3 2 8
7 3 3 13
8 3 3 21
9 3 3 34
And then ran the following commands as per the example:
estpost summarize price mpg rep78 foreign, listwise
esttab, cells("mean sd min max") nomtitle nonumber
I got the expected output with the estpost command, but got the aforementioned error when running esttab. I have uninstalled and reinstalled this package several times, using both a version downloaded onto another computer using ssc install and a version downloaded from http://repec.org/bocode/e/estout/installation.html. I feel that I must be missing something obvious...any help would be appreciated.
EDIT: I just checked with a colleague of mine, and it seems they have been inexplicably getting the same error recently.

Answer 1

This works for me. I suspect faulty installation. Despite your best efforts, you may have previously installed versions of some or all of the programs in estout on your system.
In Stata, you need to check what Stata is seeing by typing commands such as
. which esttab, all
in every directory in which you work. If necessary, repeat for all the other command files in the package as named by ssc desc estout. You should be seeing one (and only one) version of each command, dates mostly in 2009 (eststo in 2008).
A wilder hypothesis is that estout has been broken by recent changes in Stata. This seems unlikely to me, but check the above first.
(UPDATE) OP reply reveals a nightmare scenario: old versions have been found that are difficult to remove. What to do?
Look at the adopath command. In the first instance, just type adopath. Stata wants to install estout stuff in an e off whatever it labels PLUS. (If you are in the US, you probably want to say "off of".)
One possibility is that you use adopath to reset PLUS to somewhere you have write access, preferably somewhere dedicated to programs alone. That's got implications for programs already in PLUS, which are now longer visible, so you need to add whatever is now PLUS as an extra place to look. The help for adopath explains how to do this.
Another possibility is that Stata always looks in the current directory or folder for a user-written program before it looks in PLUS (unless you mess with that order, which I advise against). So, so long as programs you want are in the current directory, that should work. However, this would usually be considered poor style. Worse, as you change the working directory, you need to copy programs to that directory.
You may need to approach the administrators to delete the old stuff. It is hard to work with user-written programs for Stata if you don't have the right privileges.