Office 2000 will not install on Windows 98 machine

[Bill Livingstone]

My Office 2000 had been running great on this Windows98
machine until I updated to SP2 and I may have
inadvertently updated to SP3 also. Now I can't remove,
reinstall or update my Office 2000 apps. I get the patch
errors addressed in knowledge base articles 295823 and
324906 but my windows installer ver is 2.0.26002 so I
can't use the fix (Msicu.exe) as explained in article
295823. I am guseeing that I have a Windows
Installer/registry problem. Is there any help for this
mess?

The Windows installer error message is "This patch 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."
Thanks!

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Hi, Bill,

If you get the Windows Installer 2.0 SDK, you get MSIZAP2.0. This is what
you can run on WinXP machines AND other machines running Windows Installer
2.0.
It doesn't have a good UI, but a couple of folks have said it works great.

http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/sdkupdate/

It's also available on your XP CD under

<drive>:\SUPPORT\TOOLS\support.cab

You'll need to extract it from the cab file. You can run msizap /? to get
the parameters for how it's used to remove Windows Installer data for
Office.

MsiZap needs to be run from DOS. Wherever you find MsiZap (the following is
from the Installer SDK), do the following:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDK\Bin>msizap t {Product ID}

Product ID mean the GUID. You might find it in a file in your TEMP
directory called something like "Office 2000 <edition>
Setup(####)_MsiExec.txt". If the TEMP directory is empty, you can find the
GUID using another method. Go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\
Click on the GUID folder numbers, and you should see a key called Display
Name. One of the folders will have MS Office as the display name, and the
folder number is your GUID. (You may also find it in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Registration\ )

Make sure you use the curly brackets when executing
msizap t {GUID}
You'll know it works when you see a stream of text fly up the screen.