re-install problem with Office XP Professional

[Heather]

We have a brand new Dell Optiplex with Windows and Office
XP Professional.

The User had a problem (all office files were locked for
editing) and called Dell. They suggested reinstalling
Office XP Pro from the disks that were sent out with the
computer.

Since the re-install, everyone time one attempts to access
an Office program, we get the message "This patch package
could not be opened. Contact the application vendor to
verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch
package".

MS has a fix for this problem for situations where a
previous version of Windows or Office was installed. This
is not the problem here and I can find no solution in teh
knowledge base.

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Hi, Heather,

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.