All Office Icons Missing

[Ed Black]

Recently all of my Office 2003 Icons as well as Quicktime/Itunes, Adobe
Reader and Ad Aware suddenly disappeared and were replaced with generic
icons. When I start an Office program I get the Windows Installer screen,
then the error message:

An error occured and this feature is no longer functioning properly. Please
run Setup and select "Repair..." to restore this application.

After I click OK the program comes up and functions fine. When I try to run
Setup, I get this message:

This 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 was able to restore the other programs by re-installing them. Would I be
creating more problems, or loose my files, by re-installing Office? Any
help would be appreciated.

 

[DL]

Repairing Office does not impact on data files, a backup of data, which you
should have anyway, is allways wise

 

[Mary Sauer]

If you decide to use the following utility, be certain you have your product
key.
You receive the "This patch package could not be opened" error message in an
Office program
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=295823

You can find your key by running the Belarc Adviser
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

 

[Ed Black]

Mary,

Thanks! That worked perfectly.

Ed

If you decide to use the following utility, be certain you have your product
key.
You receive the "This patch package could not be opened" error message in an
Office program
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=295823

You can find your key by running the Belarc Adviser
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html


--
Mary Sauer MSFT MVP
http://office.microsoft.com/
http://msauer.mvps.org/
news://msnews.microsoft.com

 

[Mary Sauer]

Hey, glad to help, thanks for posting back, it is appreciated.

 

[mccarw]

If you used any of the Cloning programs to clone your boot disk to a new
drive there is one folder you need to copy over manually after the
cloning.

It is the C:\Windows\installer directory. It will not be visible
unless you turn on view protected system files in Tools->Folder
Options->View

Copy the whole directory over or else you will find that some of your
icon types (particularly MS Office) will have disappeared and you cannot
re-install / repair (because setup sees there is an installation but
there is no installer files there so it crashes)