01 January 2007

Office Ultimate 2007 Installation Fails – How to fix it!

If you, like myself and millions out there, couldn't wait for Office 2007 and installed the beta bits as soon as they became available, then you too will be facing an "upgrade" shortly as the beta bits expire early next year.
I discussed my erroneous assumption that I'll be able to upgrade my Office 2007 Professional Plus 2007 Beta 2 TR to the RTM bits for Office Ultimate 2007. The issue was that the RTM bits would not "upgrade" any of the beta versions. So in order to get to the new version, I had to uninstall all my beta versions. I had the Office suite as well as SharePoint Designer 2007 Beta 2 TR and Visio 2007 Beta 2 TR installed.
I began by just removing the Office suite… same error message.
Then I removed the Visio beta… same error message.
"OK fine" I thought as I uninstalled the SharePoint Designer beta as well.
Restart setup and… same error message! Say WHAT?!?!
I checked the Windows Add/Remove Programs to see if there was any beta bits left.
As you can see, Visio for Enterprise Architects is listed as well as Live Meeting 2005, but NO 2007 products.
"OK" I thought. "A reboot will fix it."
So I rebooted… restart Setup… SAME ERROR MESSAGE!!!
By this point I'm starting to run out of ideas.
After scratching around for a couple of minutes, I conclude that the Office beta products must have left registry entries behind and I'm going to have to user a registry cleaning utility to fix it.
Though I'm not afraid to make registry changes, I've always avoided tools that make mass registry changes… quite frankly, that scares me a bit.
Anyway, so I conduct a search for the term "registry cleanup tools" and find:

You'll notice that the first item listed, after the sponsored links of course, is from the Microsoft Support site and not only does it appear to be a registry cleanup tool, but it appears to be a tool that fixes previous Windows Installer problems… EXACTLY WHAT I NEED! J
I proceed to download the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility from the Microsoft Support site.
[TIP: Add this tool to your toolbox. It'll save you some day!]
Once downloaded, I installed it and fired it up and what do I see?
I took the liberty of pointing out the Live Meeting 2005 entry and the Visio for Enterprise Architects entry, the two entries that are side by side in the Add/Remove Programs screen.
As you can see, there are 4 beta tools listed.
I selected them an clicked Remove.
Then I quit the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility and restarted Office Ultimate 2007 Setup and… TADA!!! J
Finally, I was able to complete my installation.
So if you run into the same issue, get the Windows Installer Cleanup UtilityJ
Later
C

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