Office 2007 & 2003 vs Windows Installer woes

[Mal]

I tried to install Microsoft Office 2007 Home & Student edition on a
manager's wife's home PC over Office 2003 Basic Edition but during
install it said that there had been a previous attempt at installing
Office 2007 that had failed and asked if I wanted to rollback?

I said yes and then it continued but at the end said that there'd been
an error.

I installed Windows Installer CleanUp Utility to delete any Office 2007
entries, restarted the PC and tried again but it said the same thing
again.

I then full uninstalled Office 2003, cleaned up installer entries for
that, rebooted and tried again.

Same result.

So I gave up (for now) and tried to reinstall Office 2003, but it won't
let me do that either - again saying that there's an older install
attempt that was unsuccessful and after rollback instead of going to the
end of the install before declaring an error when it gets to the
registering components stage I get "The Windows Installer Service could
not be accessed" and then it crashes.

I used to services.msc to check Windows Installer and it says manual but
it wasn't running. So i started it and then tried again.

Same result and it stops the Windows Installer service when this
happens.

I've tried upgrading windows installer to latest version, both methods
in kb315346, dial-a-fix application but it's still not working.

I even tried a rollback to before everything and although Office 2003
files are back in their places when I try to open them I get "Office
needs to be installed for this user" and it then closes

I can't even install OpenOffice as a stop-gap measure either as i have
exactly the same problems with that too now.

Any ideas short of me having to do a full reinstall of XP?

 

[DL]

I believe you will find a caveate on the clean up utility pages that says
not to use this on Office 2007 - not an answer I know.
You might try the system file checker on winxp, or even a winxp repair

 

[Mal]

I believe you will find a caveate on the clean up utility pages that says
not to use this on Office 2007 - not an answer I know.
You might try the system file checker on winxp, or even a winxp repair

ok will try that

thanks