Office 2003 Deployment via GP / Transform / Outlook Profile rolls back depending of user Windows Profiles

Hello delcor1,

I'm not offering any answer here but both those keys are where word or outlook store their user custom settings like toolbar settings or app window states etc....

in your first comment you said that deleting and recreating a new user profile solves the problem, that's probably because you have no problem creating those data keys is there something in the old profile that prevents the installer from creating those keys? maybe there is a similar key and does the GUID not match

maybe for a test if you create those keys yourself and run the install again as if nothing happened then it would run? [this is no solution just see if that goes through]

bruintje

I'm trying various things.  One of my hunches has to do with the placement of the normal.dot file.  The current Office XP installation has all users pointing to a shared, read only, normal.dot file, which I don't like.  One thing the CIW might allow me to do is push a new one down.

I opened up a case with MS and I'm working with a very good Office Deployment tech support person who sent me the following registry entry to allow for verbose logging during the final install process.  Of course, then I had to re-create the error so I could send him the logs.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer]
"Debug"=dword:00000007
"Logging"="voicewarmup"

As I was writing this comment, I just received a call from the MS Tech (yes, he's called me numerous times today!).  He just sent me a link to a hotfix for the Office Resource Kit that is not yet released.  I don't think I can share it yet, but this certainly looks like a bug in the CIW.

MS supplied me with the following hotfix:

office2003-KB835209-ENU.exe

which from what I can see is referenced in the TID:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/835209

My initial tests indicate that this hotfix is correcting the problem on my test deployment machines.  Mind you, that the hotfix is not applied to individual machines.  It is a hotfix for the Office 2003 ORK.  It updates the ORK and the CIW.  I reopened my custom transform MST and resaved it using the updated CIW.

Another bug that was confirmed was that the Office 2003 CIW is unable to uninstall FrontPage XP.  The default behavior of the 2003 install is supposed to uninstall FrontPage XP, but it fails and this was reproduced by MS.  Even if you specifically chain an uninstall procedure in the CIW.

The tech supplied the following command line for uninstalling FrontPage XP:

msiexec /x {90280409-6000-11D3-8CFE-0050048383C9}

I hope this info helps others who are banging their head against this problem.  In my case, I'm at least gratified that it was a bug, and not something I was doing wrong.