Installer Frustrations

[NewScene]

I am completely, utterly, absolutely frustrated by Microsoft's Installer for
Office!!!! I had to recover my daughter's Thinkpad this week and the D**N
Office installer is hosed. I used a backup from my Thinkpad and created a
new disk for her machine. Then I created a new user account for her. At that
point, I start getting the dreaded message:

"This patch package could not be opened. Contact the application vendor
to verify that
this is a valid Windows Installer patch package. "

NOTHING I have done gets around this. I have followed the instuctions in
Microsoft Knowledge Base Articles - 295823 and 324906 TO THE LETTER. First,
the "Installer Cleanup Utility" is a joke and doesn't work on my system
anyway as it alread has Installer 2.0.

I've checked the DCOM level is already set to IDENTIFY and the System
account has FULL permissions across ALL directories and files. As instructed
I've renamed the msisip.dll to old and reinstalled the service packs (was
originally and is currently SP4). I've checked the registry permissions.
I've tried 'fixing' the security key for msiserver and when I rerun
'instmsiw.exe' it says the service already exists and refuses to run.

This has happened time and time again with the D**N installer and it is
frustrating. I reached the point where I finally installed 'OpenOffice' so
that she would at least have something to work with, but she really needs
Office. Of course, you also can't UNINSTALL Office because it requires the
installer as well! Catch-22 squared!!!

This seems to happen EVERY time anything goes wrong with Windows and it has
to be recovered some how. It has happened on another Thinkpad I have and it
now also has OpenOffice because we can't fix the D**N installer!

Does ANYONE know how to get actually around this problem?

John Steele
johnsteele <at> insyte <dot> com <dot> ignorethis <dot> com

 

[Brian]

I am completely, utterly, absolutely frustrated by Microsoft's Installer for
Office!!!! I had to recover my daughter's Thinkpad this week and the D**N
Office installer is hosed. I used a backup from my Thinkpad and created a
new disk for her machine. Then I created a new user account for her. At that
point, I start getting the dreaded message:

"This patch package could not be opened. Contact the application vendor
to verify that
this is a valid Windows Installer patch package. "

NOTHING I have done gets around this. I have followed the instuctions in
Microsoft Knowledge Base Articles - 295823 and 324906 TO THE LETTER. First,
the "Installer Cleanup Utility" is a joke and doesn't work on my system
anyway as it alread has Installer 2.0.

I've checked the DCOM level is already set to IDENTIFY and the System
account has FULL permissions across ALL directories and files. As instructed
I've renamed the msisip.dll to old and reinstalled the service packs (was
originally and is currently SP4). I've checked the registry permissions.
I've tried 'fixing' the security key for msiserver and when I rerun
'instmsiw.exe' it says the service already exists and refuses to run.

This has happened time and time again with the D**N installer and it is
frustrating. I reached the point where I finally installed 'OpenOffice' so
that she would at least have something to work with, but she really needs
Office. Of course, you also can't UNINSTALL Office because it requires the
installer as well! Catch-22 squared!!!

This seems to happen EVERY time anything goes wrong with Windows and it has
to be recovered some how. It has happened on another Thinkpad I have and it
now also has OpenOffice because we can't fix the D**N installer!

Does ANYONE know how to get actually around this problem?

This seems to be a very common problem as I have been repeating this advice
almost daily since I encountered the same situation myself a few weeks ago.

The essence of the problem is probably that the registry still has the
installer entries for Office XP as originally installed. What you need to do
is delete the first of those registry items to fool the system into thinking
that Office XP is not installed. When you then install it again, it should
keep all of the original settings.

Click Start/Run then type Regedit and click OK.

1) Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products and locate the product name
(in the right hand panel) There is an entry for every product called
ProductName.
2) Rename the product id key (the long string of numbers in the left-hand
panel) to something starting with an underscore (in case anything goes wrong
and you need to reinstate it).
3) Reinstall the product and download/install the updates.

There should be no need to reboot the PC.

Brian