Unable to uninstall Beta 2 Refresh - help

[Milhouse Van Houten]

I have the full Office Beta 2 Refresh installed on XP Pro SP1 and wanted to
uninstall the whole lot.

I first went to the core apps in Add/Remove, "Microsoft Office Professional
Edition 2003," and selected it. I was soon at the usual "Preparing to
uninstall..." window. Unfortunately, it doesn't get past that point and
essentially hangs the system. I can move the mouse around, but that's it.
Even Task Manager doesn't come up.

I did leave it for about 10 minutes, but with no disk activity at all after
the first 10 seconds, no way.

So after the reboot, I tried uninstalling each of the other Office apps
listed -- FrontPage, InfoPath, OneNote, Publisher, Visio -- and they all
came off quickly with no problem. The "Preparing to uninstall..." window
flashed by with all of them.

I then tried the core apps again, but the same problem.

What's left to do here? I can't imagine what's causing this and haven't
been able to find any explanation for it. I do have some 2004 apps
installed (post Beta 2 Refresh), like Money, Streets & Trips, and Encarta,
but I would hope those wouldn't be running interference in any way; they
didn't for all the other Office apps.

Thanks

 

[Milhouse Van Houten]

For the record, I decided to leave the "Preparing to remove..." dialog up
even longer than 10 minutes. After about 20 minutes of absolutely nothing
happening, not even disk activity, I got this message and the system freed
up:

"The patch package could not be opened. Contact the application vendor to
verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch package."

Which led me to this last resort:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;295823

And seemingly a deadend, since Msicu.exe and Msicuu.exe (Windows Installer
CleanUp) do not work on modern OS's that have MSI.DLL 2.0 or
higher(Microsoft Installer), which of course XP does.

But before long, I found that there's a command-prompt equivalent of those
tools that will work in XP, called MSIZAP.EXE. Here's a thread about it:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&th=b8427403a4c9dd36&rnum=2

I got my MSIZAP.EXE from the WinXP CD as explained in the Google thread.

These tools are further described here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=/directory/worldwide/en-gb/utility2.asp

What MSIZAP does is remove all the Windows Installer-related information
from your Registry for the program of your choosing, in this case Office,
then allowing you to manually delete the program from your disk and
reinstall it fairly cleanly. I also took care to delete the massive Office
branches in the Registry under HKLM and HKCU before installing.

It worked, but realizing all this is still a beast to have to figure out,
and having to wait 20 minutes or so for an error message is ridiculous. I
guess MSI just collapsed under the weight of Office XP once having been on
the system followed by all the Office 2003 betas.