Office 2007 Updates Refuse to Install

May 18, 2009 by james.

Of course, I can’t go through the week without breaking my own computer.  (Keeping in mind I don’t get paid to fix my own stuff…..)

 My Office 2007 installation has refused updates for a while, each one that attempted to install returned an error stating that I had a corrupted installation database.  I couldn’t repair or uninstall the Office 2007 suite as well.

 Thankfully, my Google searching skills were strong, so I was able to was able to find some success by following the instructions by dlauber in this thread:  http://forums.techarena.in/ms-office-support/729760.htm

 The gist is that you have to go into the registry, open HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products and find the GUIDs corresponding to each MS Office product and component.  Once there, rename or delete the Patches key for each one.  (Yes, I know there’s a large number of them, and yes, I know that I could probably write a script to do it, but I’m not a good enough scripter that I could write the script quicker than doing the manual edits on this one PC.)

To help you find the appropriate GUIDs, on my machine, all of the Office-related GUIDs started with 000021.  (There were a couple of other programs from MS that had GUIDs that started with 000021 as well, but hopefully this will help you narrow the search.)

Now if I just knew what caused this to happen, I’d be in business.  Hopefully this will help someone else out there recover from this error.

 James

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