"Patch Package" problem

S

stainless

I have a licensed version of Office Professional Edition
2003 that is a Home use program, based on me having a
version at work.

I had problems with my home pc that meant I had to
uninstall many programs to identify the problem. One of
these was the Office Pro software. This did not help and
thus, I restored Windows XP to a version before I removed
Office Pro. Now, if I try to access any of the Office Pro
elements (Excel, Word etc), I get the following error
message, after a Preparing to Install window is
displayed :

"The patch package could not be opened. Verify that the
patch package exists and that you can access it, or
contact the application vendor to verify that this is a
valid Windows Installer patch package"

I cannot re-install from the CD for the same reason.

Also, my product id is not recognised by the Microsoft
site (?????) , so I can get no help there.

Please, anybody with any ideas?
 
B

Brian

stainless said:
I have a licensed version of Office Professional Edition
2003 that is a Home use program, based on me having a
version at work.

I had problems with my home pc that meant I had to
uninstall many programs to identify the problem. One of
these was the Office Pro software. This did not help and
thus, I restored Windows XP to a version before I removed
Office Pro. Now, if I try to access any of the Office Pro
elements (Excel, Word etc), I get the following error
message, after a Preparing to Install window is
displayed :

"The patch package could not be opened. Verify that the
patch package exists and that you can access it, or
contact the application vendor to verify that this is a
valid Windows Installer patch package"

I cannot re-install from the CD for the same reason.

Also, my product id is not recognised by the Microsoft
site (?????) , so I can get no help there.

Please, anybody with any ideas?
Click to expand...

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
 
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