I’ve just made it through a pretty nasty problem with Office. I had been running the beta version, and had updated it to the RTM version available on MSDN. Yesterday I got a message saying that it was going to expire in 2 days. I tried changing my product key, but it wouldn’t accept my (legitimate) key. I did notice one odd thing that the version numbers were mismatched at various areas of the system – both 14.0.0460 and 14.0.0463 were showing. As it turns out, that had nothing to do with it, as this is expected behaviour, but I decided to do a full uninstall and reinstall.
After reinstalling, every one of my Office applications wanted to run through configuration every time they started. This problem, as it turns out is not new, and there are unfortunately many possible causes, and as many solutions. I tried many of them. I did have the registry permissions problem with HKEY_CLASSES, and walked through the solution outlined here. It helped me with OneNote and Outlook, but Word and Excel were still problems. Uninstalling and reinstalling (multiple times) didn’t help at all.
Luckily,(for me) a colleague had some really nasty problems last year that required him completely removing Office 2007 from his computer. After speaking with Microsoft support,he received a utility that was to do the job, and it worked well. I thought I’d give it a whirl. Unfortunately, it only wiped 2007 not 2010, but luckily, it’s a vbs file and therefore editable.
After removing all 2007 and 2010 applications from control panel, I ran the 2007 utility, which found and removed lots of stuff. I copied the file and then edited it to be relevant for Office 2010. I then ran it, and it did its magic, with a few errors related to the removal of unrelated temp files. A reboot, a reinstall, and I’m up and running again. Nice – I wasn’t looking forward to the idea of repaving my system.
I”ve included both of these removal utilities here. No warranties are expressed or implied, they may help or hurt, they may make your system catch on fire, and if they do, don’t blame me. All I can say is that they worked really well for me.
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