SubscribeManually removing the Office 2007 Beta
WARNING: These steps are only for advanced users. You might render your computer unusable, if you don’t use these steps 100% correctly. If you have a problem with these steps, you are on your own!
- In the instructions below quotation marks should not be included when typing the suggested text and the asterisk is a wildcard representing any string of one or more characters.
- Delete the folders and registry keys in the exact order specified.
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If you have Expression Web Beta 1 installed, remove it before using these steps. These steps will otherwise render EW non-functional and you won’t be able to remove it anymore.
- Make sure to uninstall all Microsoft Office 2007 add-ins before starting this process, especially ones for Outlook.
Microsoft has published the removal steps previously posted here as Knowledge Base Article. For your convenience, I am still providing the steps below. Note that you probably will only see this content if you are reading this directly on my website. Also note that Firefox 2 doesn’t display the KB article correctly.
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 928218
November 13th, 2006 at 4:12
[…] One or more of the Office 2007 beta programs won’t uninstall automatically. Please use the manual removal steps. […]
November 13th, 2006 at 17:03
In addition to these steps and the KB article, I was unable to continue until I did the following (I assume because an earlier version of Office had never been cleaned up completely):
Run setup, get the error, then navigate to %temp% and look at the latest SetupExe(200…).log
There will be a line near the end like:
Catalyst beta product conflict check failed. Office Beta product conflict is detected on the computer, productcode={30120000-001F-040C-0000-0000000FF1CE}
Take the product code and run from the command prompt:
msiexec /uninstall {30120000-001F-040C-0000-0000000FF1CE}
Rinse and repeat until setup completes successfully. I couldn’t find a resource that listed all of the GUIDs necessary in my case, but it took 11 tries I believe. I’m sure it varies by build and which components and shared tools I had installed.
Hope this helps someone.
November 14th, 2006 at 6:53
I had a problem with installing RTM complaining about prerelease versions. My problem was solved by uninstalling Save as PDF add-on.
November 14th, 2006 at 16:48
I can’t thank you enough for these steps!!! I was completely stuck until I found this page after 2 days of searching on the internet. After running through these steps I was able it install no problem. I’m just glad I didn’t have to re-ghost my computer. Again many thanks!!!
November 14th, 2006 at 16:51
Glad to hear they helped Len
November 15th, 2006 at 1:17
thanks a ton for the tips. the msi uninstalls cleared it up for me.
November 15th, 2006 at 9:49
Will join the list of others to say THANK YOU for this information. The msi uninstall was the key as well and never would have found without your insight.
November 15th, 2006 at 11:42
thanks a ton! learned something about the ‘installer’s directory and manually removing programs. appreciate the help.
November 15th, 2006 at 13:12
Thanks a lot. This post helped quite a bit!
November 15th, 2006 at 16:53
oh thank god! i love you!
i was stuck with the beta for so long, not even microsoft could help me. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
November 15th, 2006 at 19:36
Thank you VERY MUCH!!!!
You saved me from loosing my studies
Thank you again from Israel…
November 16th, 2006 at 11:08
[…] Ayer me bajé el Office Professional 2007 definitivo del sitio de suscripciones de MSDN (la versión en inglés , hay que esperar unas pocas semanas para la versión en español). Como tenía la versión Beta, primero tuve que desinstalar esta y ahí comenzó el problema: había una instalación abortada de Project 2007 y no podía desinstalar nada 2007 de la manera usual. Por suerte un amigo RD me dirigió a esta página que explica como desinstalar manualmente los betas de Office 2007, el proceso es un poco largo y hay que tener cuidado pero efectivamente los betas se fueron (gracias Patrick Schmidt). Luego de eso, instalar Office 2007 resultó rápido y sencillo. Ahora miren a mi nuevo PowerPoint: Se pueden ver un par de los nuevos efectos especiales para imágenes: el reflejo en el piso y el brillo rojo alrededor del servidor se pueden agregar a cualquier imagen. Si Office 2007 se ve bien, PowerPoint es uno de los productos a los que se les ha agregado más detallitos chéveres. Published Thursday, November 16, 2006 9:58 AM by Edgar Sánchez Filed under: Descargas, Office, Powerpoint […]
November 18th, 2006 at 5:02
[…] Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | live it! Published 18-11-2006 04:52 by martinpoon Filed under Office, VSTO, Project, Groove, SharePoint,Visio, OneNote, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Access, Publisher, InfoPath, beta, Outlook […]
November 19th, 2006 at 13:39
thank you. the save as pdf plugin was the culprit on mine. everything worked fine after removing that.
November 26th, 2006 at 12:13
Thankyou! msi removal was also the key for me, it’s a pity I didn’t find this information sooner.
November 28th, 2006 at 10:39
I was able to use MyUninstaller from nirsoft.net (freeware) to find and uninstall all Office 2007 related programs and then successfully install the RTM.
December 4th, 2006 at 10:27
You are just wonderful Patrick. We wasted almost a full day for 4 trainees just to uninstall the beta of MOSS 2007. You helped us in finishing it in just about 90 minutes.
Thanks a ton.
December 30th, 2006 at 15:53
Thanks for the fix Patrick!
Not all the “steps”worked on my machine but the end result was those that did removed both Betas.
Happy New Year!
January 7th, 2007 at 11:24
Thank you. I truly appreciate your kindness in posting this solution.
January 16th, 2007 at 14:45
Patrick,
I am not sure if I should follow these steps because I get an error message when I try to uninstall Office 2007 Professional Plus BETA from the add/remove program list. It says corrupt install please reinsert CD, DVD or original installation. So I haven’t even gotten as far as installing a newer version. Help?!?
January 16th, 2007 at 20:14
Dan, if you can’t remove it, then you have to follow these steps.
January 16th, 2007 at 21:01
I went to open msiexec and a dialog box opened and asked if I am sure I want to uninstall this product and I clicked yes and then a dialog box opened and said that the installation package could not be opened. Verify that the package exists and I can access and to contact the application vendor to verify that it is a valid application.
January 16th, 2007 at 21:07
Dan, if something doesn’t work, move on to the next item on the list. Somewhere during the first step it is going to fail almost for sure, because if it didn’t, Office would have been removed automatically.
January 16th, 2007 at 23:38
Thank you VERY much! It seems to have removed it. One last question, should I install the trial version of Office 2003 that came with my pc or download the 2007 trial or wait for the full release on Jan. 30?
January 16th, 2007 at 23:40
Up to you. You can always convert the 2007 trial to a full version after Jan 30 without having to reinstall anything.
January 17th, 2007 at 1:51
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Now can you tell me how to remove Office 2003 manually?
January 17th, 2007 at 1:55
No sorry. Search Google
January 17th, 2007 at 12:29
OK, everything uninstalled, once again THANKS! I downloaded the trial version and everything will open except there is no Outlook. I have tried redownloading and reinstalling and nothing. Any ideas??
January 17th, 2007 at 16:51
Do you have any other version of Office installed? If you, remove the Outlook from that version first, then run setup again and choose a custom setup. Switch Outlook 2007 from not available to install.
January 17th, 2007 at 20:08
I feel like I am bothering you. I hope not because I truly appreciate all of your help. When I try to remove Office 2003 it says that the patch package cannot be accessed. Verify that the patch package exists and contact the apllication provider. I have tried repair on each of Office 2003 and Office 2007.
??????
January 17th, 2007 at 20:24
Dan, you should ask this question in the Office newsgroups: http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/FlyoutOverview.mspx
January 17th, 2007 at 20:31
Thanks!
January 22nd, 2007 at 16:33
Thanks. I also had to get rid of 2005 Live Meeting. Once that was gone, then the install worked.
January 24th, 2007 at 18:41
Thanks! Nasty!
January 28th, 2007 at 21:18
Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components will make it hang also.
February 2nd, 2007 at 9:33
I have a rather irritating problem. I tried uninstalling 2007 beta but it refused to uninstall so i deleted all the files from program files.Now when i use msiexec it says that another version of the soft is already installed so it cant uninstall.Im really screwed man.Is there any way i can uninstall 2007 beta without having to format my pc?
February 2nd, 2007 at 11:48
Why don’t you use the steps posted above? Try to do as much as you can of step 1, then move on to the next steps
February 3rd, 2007 at 0:30
Me again.It says that it cant find the office mui.msi. I think i might have delted the setup too. Do you reinstalling beta and then uninstalling will help?
February 6th, 2007 at 7:12
Many thanks for you support on this issue. Being a hardware / software developer, I should have known better to wait for a full release instead of messing with a Microsoft beta. I think in the future I will take preference to choking on the normal volume of bugs Microsoft provides in full releases.
February 10th, 2007 at 9:50
Again, thanks for the invaluable help Patrick - and thanks also to Aaron Bertrand - although in my case if only took seven goes!
February 24th, 2007 at 21:30
I started going through the manual remove program, but when I went to uninstall the msi file for Microsoft office professional (beta) installer it would start to uninstall, but then I would get the error message that I received when I tried using add/remove in control panel. The message was: Error 1402. Setup cannot open the Registry Key UNKNOWN\.mdb\PersistentHandler. Verify that you have sufficient permissions to access the reistry or contack Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS) for assistance. Any ideas?
March 6th, 2007 at 14:46
I never had the BETA installed. I have the Office Professonal 2007 Trial installed. My Office 2003 is still operable. I cannot purchase the 2007 version and am unable to unistall the 2007 Trial. Add/Remove simply blinks and returns with no action.
Will the BETA removal steps work on the Trial version 2007 as well?
March 6th, 2007 at 14:48
Arnold, yes. The steps work for the RTM build (retail, trial, etc) as well.
March 9th, 2007 at 6:13
Patrick, I am having similar trouble with Sharepoint Server 2007. The error I am getting is:
Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):
Microsoft Office Server Trial Edition products may not be installed on a server with licensed Microsoft Office Server products. Remove existing Microsoft Office Server products and re-run setup.
Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.
However I am not having any previous version and cleaned any traces in the registry. Do you know any silimar way to un-clean any previous version of Sharepoint Server 2007?
March 9th, 2007 at 6:15
Sorry, The question should have been: Do you know any silimar way to clean any previous version of Sharepoint Server 2007?
March 9th, 2007 at 9:46
Dheeraj,
sorry, I don’t know anything about the server products.
March 10th, 2007 at 16:44
Hazy03, just keep going with the steps…
March 10th, 2007 at 21:13
Hi
Im unsure about this step:
7. For each .msi file that has the subject “Microsoft Office product_name 2007″ in the Windows Installer folder, follow these steps.
Important Do not close the Windows Installer folder. a. Click Start, click Run, and then type msiexec.exe /x.
I do this step and it asks if I want to delete the “msiexec.exe /x.” file. As the instruction for this first step do not mention to click ok to this option is it OK. There is no other option here for me to take. the next step is straight forward. Im just curious to know whether this in the correct action.
Thx to any response.
from Matt
March 10th, 2007 at 21:16
You are doing something wrong. It shouldn’t ask to delete msiexec.exe. You are supposed to run msiexec.exe with the parameter /x and it should ask to remove whatever you wrote after the x. So you’d type into run: “msiexec.exe /x NameOfProductYouIdentified”
Patrick
March 10th, 2007 at 21:52
Ok thanks Patrick.
I follow it now, thats make more sense.
Thx
March 15th, 2007 at 12:32
After following All the steps in the original post, plus post 2 and post 3 I was successful in my installation in Vista.
Although the following were not applicable:
7. Click Start, click Run, type %appdata%\microsoft\templates, and then click OK.
8. Delete the following files:
• Normal.dotm
• Normalemail.dotm
9. Click Start, click Run, type %appdata%\microsoft\document building blocks\language_id, and then click OK.
10. Delete the “Building blocks.dotx” file.
Thanks a million. I was about to go back to XP and 2005 and call it a year.
March 22nd, 2007 at 23:00
Hi, I am trying to uninstall MS Office 2007 Beta and am getting the error “corrupt install please reinsert CD, DVD or original installation” when I go to add/remove programs. I am trying to follow the steps listed in the KB from Microsoft, but I’m running into some problems …
1) When I try to delete the “Office 12″ folder from Microsoft Shared, I get the error “Cannot delete MSOXMLMF.DLL: Access is denied.”
2) When I try to delete the “Office 12″ folder from Program Files, I get the error “Cannot delete MSOHEV.DLL: Access is denied.”
3) I went to open msiexec and a dialog box opened and asked if I am sure I want to uninstall this product and I clicked yes and then a dialog box opened and said that the installation package could not be opened. Verify that the package exists and I can access and to contact the application vendor to verify that it is a valid application.
Any ideas what is causing these problems? Thank you so much!
Gina
March 23rd, 2007 at 10:51
Nevermind, it works now. It took several reboots and re-doing some of the original steps.
Thanks,
Gina
March 26th, 2007 at 12:11
Steps worked like a charm. Thanks for the info.
- Jim
March 31st, 2007 at 15:22
[…] If the automatic removal process fails, use the manual removal steps […]
July 2nd, 2007 at 20:59
[…] I have installed EssentialPIM now and want to get my contacts loaded into it. So I go to fire up Outlook. Nothing happens. Go to the Office directory and hunt for Outlook.exe. It’s not there! Damn. So I go to my install disk to reinstall Outlook, hoping to restore my contacts. The option is crossed out with a big, red X. I wonder what is going on? After all I had installed lots of ‘test’ email programs. Did testing these email programs somehow mess up a new Outlook installation? So I decide that no matter what, I’m going to get the damn thing installed. (And I loath Outlook.) I have this software, a downloaded torrent of MS Office Enterprise 2007 which means it has just about everything that can be an office utility is in it. OneNote, PowerPoint, InfoPath, Outlook, Word, Excel, Access, Groove, all kinds of stuff I do not need! But there you go. I take out the disk and start a reinstall. (I had deleted Office 2007 from my computer). And it would not install. It kept giving me an error message that I researched over and over. So in comes a way to remove Office entirely from your hard drive. It requires working in the (OMG) registry. Oh no. So I back up my registry and go in and follow the directions most carefully. Read removing Office 2007. I did everything, step by step, carefully, slowly, holding my breath each and every painful delete. And after countless reboots I wound up not even being able to get into my user account. Okay, not to fear, I’ve got the registry backed up. I go to restore, and voila…it failed. My user account was a black screen I could not navigate. So what to do, what to do. Consulting my young son, who seems to have a gift for understanding even the most messed up computer, said, Create a new account. Thus, Major Danger was born. And when I booted him up, there was his XP in all its blue glory. But none of my old documents were available. AND I still had some weird registry thing going on. None of my programs were associated with their file types. So I had to manually go and start anything I wanted to run, like view text files, or unzip a download. BUT I will tell you that using this program RegistryFix was fantastic. It is the first program of its type that really did what it promised and believe me, my registry has been subjected to many, many programs promising to give it a face lift and speed up this computer. This is the one to choose. […]
January 18th, 2009 at 12:52
[…] Re: Unable to uninstall 2007 Hi, Dan, See if this helps: Manually removing the Office 2007 Beta http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/11/13/79 — Please reply to the newsgroup. I cannot respond to private requests for help. Besides, then the community doesn’t benefit from your question! — Susan Ramlet MVP - Office "Dan" <Dan> wrote in message news:77DA0043-708A-48AA-8976-AFA37FA44464… >I was running Office 2003 and decided to try the 2007 Beta. I installed and > ran successfully, but when the beta was up I uninstalled and 2003 would no > longer work. I tried to re-install twice and both times the installation > of > 2003 failed. So I checked Add/Remove and there is an instance of 2007 > Beta > Pro but when I click uninstall it tells me that my computer does my > computer > does not support the package language. I tried to download and install > the > 2007 Trial, but it won’t install because it sees another instance(that I > can’t remove) and won’t install. […]