Office Keeps Re-Installing When I Try To Open Word, Excel...etc.

I have followed these instructions to the letter, including adding the registry keys and resetting the security settings.  All to no avail.  Still can't understand why Microsoft doesn't produce a diagnostic tool for what seems like a reasonably common and very irritating problem.

Does it happen when you open any particular application or is it common across all the office applications? Have you checked if you have multiple versions of

office because that too can lead to conflicts due to the different versions of the shared .dll files. If that is the case try removing the secondary version of office.

You can check for the installed versions of Office on your computer in Programs and Features through Control Panel.

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

322756  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/ ) How to back up and restore the registry in Windows

If that does not help either, try running the fixit article for fixing registry problems.

If there are no multiple versions then try running the following registry command from the command prompt:

reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0<appname>\Options /v NoReReg /t REG_DWORD /d 1

The <appname> property refers to the executable of the application you are trying to launch.

For Ex:  reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0*Outlook*\Options /v NoReReg /t REG_DWORD /d 1 for outlook.

You will need to repeat this action with all the applications that you are facing the issue with.

If the above steps does not help either, then you could try running this particular fixit article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313222

Note: The above fix it article does not apply to a 64 Bit Machine.

 Run a repair of Office Installation and then try launching the office applications. Hope that fixes the problem for you.

Mithun Pai, Microsoft Answers Support Engineer.

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Thanks for jumping in Mithun.

I had turned off the UAC a few days ago and then I was able to go through the newest Adobe Flash update install manually doing a "run as administrator".  I located the file named opa12.dat in the Program Data folder.  I made sure the files in the Data Folder along with the folder it'self are owned by my login.  The files and the folder have my login, administrator and everyone "full access".  Still cannot turn off the read only flag on the Data folder, but it is off on the individual files.

Office 2007 is still re-installing.

Try switching off the UAC ( User Account Control ) and test. To do that go to the control panel and then to user accounts where you will have the option to turn the user account control on or off. If that resolves the problem, you can try giving permissions to the opa12.dat file in the Program Data folder to make sure it is not read only.

Mithun Pai, Microsoft Answers Support Engineer.

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