New Imformation on System Restore & Windows Installer Registry Corruption

There have been a number of installation errors of the July 27th Office 2003 Updates and other Office version updates, particularly Office 2003 SP1 remedied by Office resource kit tools and other tools like the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility, and I'm pasting this information that has come up from Sloan Crayton [MS] who has been generously helping and providing some useful information on using these Office tools to help with install/setup problems. Because it involves information I have not seen anywhere, including MSKB, MSDN, Technet or Windows SP2/MSI 3.0 articles and good artifcles on System Restore, I'm pasting some of it he

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After running the Installer Clean utility to remove remnants of OfficeXP, now if I try to update Office 2003 Pro from the website, this is EXACTLY what I get:


The Office Update site is unable to check for updates on this
computer. This may be happening because of one of the following
reasons:

You do not have administrative privileges for this computer.

There is a network problem and the detection catalog used by the
Office Update site failed to download. Go back to the Downloads home
page and try running detection again.

Windows Installer patch files (.MSP files) from previously applied
Office updates are missing from the \Windows\Installer hidden
directory on your computer. MSP files are stored on your computer
after update installation completes because they need to be referenced
for future update operations. If the files are missing you will not be
able to apply Office updates. You may also be unable to uninstall
Office products as a result of the same problem. Please contact
Microsoft Product Support Services for assistance.

You installed Office updates in the past and then upgraded from
Windows Installer version 1.0 to Windows Installer version 1.1. For
more information see the KB article Windows Installer May Prompt for
Install Source if Unavailable.

Search for Office updates in the Download Catalog

The Problem With System Restore and the Windows Installer Corrected by Windows Installer 3.0

(Fixing the Problem but not Fixing the Registry Once It's Corrupted):

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Windows System Restore will corrupt the Windows Installer registry
information for Office (and other applications). Windows Installer 3.0
(included in Windows XP SP2 when it ships) will fix this bug

The use of Windows System Restore is one of the known causes. Windows Installer 3.0 which is included in Windows XP SP2 fixes this problem (but will not fix it once it's broken).

You will need to use the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility to remove the
Windows Installer registry information for all installed Office products.
Then you'll need to install Office 2003 again and then install any service
packs and public updates.

This is documented in the KB article at
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;304498.

Sloan Crayton
Microsoft

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Best,

Chad Harris