Can't Reinstall Office 2003 on Windows 7 64 bit

Question

I was having problems with Visual Studio editing ASPX pages and read on stackoverflow.com that you could just uninstall the Web Authoring Component and it would fix that problem. I couldn't uninstall it because of a registry permission issue saying:

Office Error:

I used the Windows Install Clean Up utility to try to remove it.

Bad idea. It totally broke my office.

When I tried to uninstall, then reinstall office: It took me hours to figure out that (I'm pretty sure) Office was trying to use my dvd-rom drive as the local cache so i had to run the setup with this parameter which makes office install ignoring all previous settings:

setup.exe oem_noprevious=1

(I do a mini celebration because it starts copying files)

[LOTS OF CURSING] I get the same error when re-installing as when I was trying to uninstall it (see the image above)

I go into my registry, seek out that key. Turns out even if I run regedit.exe as administrator I still do not have permission to access and change permissions on said key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components\80F8A534CE34C37479A36408DF607B90\9040211900063D11C8EF10054038389C

I am looking for suggestions on how to have full control over the registry or delete a (possibly) corrupt key because I cannot modify the permissions on that key or delete it. Or any other office re-install suggestions would be fantastic.

Answer 1

Blow away your user profile. It is extreme, but it should work.

Also create an admin install point it gives you some more options (and can avoid the whole local cache issue) http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office-2003-resource-kit/creating-an-administrative-installation-point-HA001140193.aspx

Answer 2

It happened to me once that I couldn't remove a registry key because of permission issues, and I couldn't change the permissions on that node for some unknown reasons.

What I did is select the parent node of the node I wanted to remove, then set the permissions so that my user could delete that node. Then I selected the option to make the children nodes inherit those permissions. That did the trick: I could select just the node I wanted to get rid of, and delete it.

So, give it a try.