Hi, I've recently run in to a slew of problems w/ a client's Office 2003 Pro installation. Everything used to work fine, but now I've had a series of odd problems. The workstation is running XP Pro, and was initially set up using a program called MoveMe from the previous computer running WinME (great app for upgrading from ME to XP Pro since there is no MS upgrade path to do that...plus many of the original software installation disks have gone missing). Office 2000 Small Business was installed on the old machine, and was still functional (yet not used) on the new machine. Everything was working nicely for about a year.
Last week, the first problem occurred when he opened an .rtf document sent as an email attachment (from a known person, and the document was legit. Kaspersky AV is installed checking for updates using extended definitions every hour and realtime protection is enabled including email attachment scanning). When he tried to open the attachment, his computer prompted to insert the O2K Small Bus disc. I noticed many extensions that were associated w/ word 2000 instead of word 2k3. I do not know how long that has been the case. I changed all associations to word 2000 to now point to word 2003.
I tried to uninstall O2K but it asks for the CD. I have 2 O2K Small Business cd's, however, both are SR-1, and this particular machine had O2K Small Business original (SR-0) and the installer refuses to accept it because it is not the correct version. For the same reason, my O2K Professional cd's are obviously also refused. I've done both a repair and later a reinstall of Office 2003.
Currently, If Word 2003 is opened (either existing or new document), It asks for the Office 2000 cd! I've deleted every instance of Normal.dot (2k and 2k3 locations). I've also uninstalled Adobe 4.0 (left over form the old system) and reinstalled Adobe Standard 6.0 (6.0 had already been installed and was working properly for a year...but I hoping this was an Adobe toolbar issue somehow). I need to click cancel about 4 or 5 times before the O2k cd prompt goes away, then the document opens fine. As long as only the documents are closed and not Word itself, it can run and happilly open stuff all day long. Once the user finally closes Word, it pops up another "Preparing to install" dialogue, does not prompt for a cd, and closes. The next time Word is opened, the same thing happens..."Preparing to Install" then "Insert O2k small bus cd" <cancel several times> then it's fine....until closed.
The user is a local admin. Several reboots have been done.
Since I could not uninstall O2k w/o the cd, I went registry fishing and removed (well, renamed) every key I could find relating to O2k in both HKLM\Software and HKCU\Software\Classes and HKCU\Software\Microsoft\bl
ah blah blah. More reboots....no changes.
I've seen an MS Office cleanup util to scrub the registry of prior versions, but one util said it was not tested on XP and another said it should only be used *after* performing an uninstall of the old version (which I cannot do).
Wiping out this machine and starting over is not an option. He's got some software that was an absolute nightmare to get swapped over from the original machine, and other software with missing install discs.
I'm thinking my next step should be to uninstall O2k3 and Adobe standard, delete/rename any and all Office references I can find in the registry and filesystem, then reinstall O2k3 then Adobe...but his computer was not purchased at the same time as the others...and I only found O2k3 cd's (and more importantly....cd KEYS) for the other workstations. I know his version is a legit, licensed copy, I just don't know where *his* cd key is. I believe a call to MS could resolve that issue...but I'd rather extract his current key (or key hash...I don't believe the key itself is stored anywhere on the system, but unsure if copying the hash would suffice) from the surrent install if possible.
Ideas?
