Uninstalling the Compatibility Pack after Office 2007 is installed

[Jeff Hillman]

I recently installed Office 2007 Professional Plus over my old installation
of Office 2003. Had no problems with that and Office 2007 has been running
fine. During the last round of Updates from Automatic Updates, I received an
error that "... Office 2003 Professional Edition is not installed..." and the
update failed. When I looked in Add/Remove programs, I realized that the
Compatibility Pack for Office 2007 was still installed and had not been
installed by the Office 2007 installation.

Now, when I click the Uninstall button within Add/Remove programs for the
Compatibility Pack, I get the same "Office 2003 not installed" error and the
Compatibility Pack will not uninstall. I continue to get the same error
every time Automatic Updates tries to install a couple security updates,
which is really annoying. Does anyone know of a way to get rid of the
Compatibility Pack in this situation? I have seen a couple similar posts
with this type of error, but none in this specific configuration.

IMO, it seems odd that the Office 2007 installation does not remove the
Compatibility Pack when it is cleaning up the Office 2003 installation prior
to installing itself.

 

[Peter Foldes]

And what does it show in the Add\Remove in Control Panel ???

 

[Jeff Hillman]

Add/Remove shows the Compatibility Pack, and under that, SP1 and 3 security
updates. The Compatibility Pack and the 3 updates all have Remove buttons to
click, while SP1 does not.

When I click the Remove button for Compatibility Pack or any of the 3
Security updates, I get the same error message after about a minute of
processing: "Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 is not installed on
this machine. Setup can not continue" with an OK button.

It seems that because the Office 2007 install removed Office 2003 without
removing the Compatibility Pack, I cannot now remove the Pack or any of its
updates. I do not want to go through the process of uninstalling 2007,
reinstalling Office 2003, then uninstalling the Compatibility pack, just to
install Office 2007 again. I'm hoping someone figures this little loop-hole
out and releases a non-office-version-detecting Uninstall for the
Compatibility Pack so I can stop getting the errors with Automatic Updates
every other week.

 

[Peter Foldes]

See if this will help remove it

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

 

[Joseph Rosonina]

I had the same annoying problem that Jeff explained in detail. Using the
Windows Installer Cleanup Tool and Selecting to uninstall ONLY the Windows
2007 Compatability Pack resolves the issue. All of my updates worked without
issue. Thank you Peter.

 

[Jim]

The problem is solved...I found the following note in this news group and
verified that the update is no longer offered if Office 2003 is not
installed on your computer.



Jim

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The detection problems that many of you noticed on the Office Update site
for
KB949074 have now been fixed. It will now properly detect only Office 2003
environments that meet the criteria outlined here:
http://blogs.technet.com/office_sus.../2008/12/03/december-2008-update-release.aspx

If there are any other problems with this update, please reply to this
thread.

Thanks,
Bryan Spangler - SDET
Microsoft