Scott Hanselman

I'm back to work and trying to install the Released version of Office 2007, and am greeted by this friendly dialog, announcing that

"Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s): The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associates technologies."

Hm...considering that I've never installed Office 2007 Beta on this machine, and I think this would qualify as a very poor error message that would totally stump my Mom.

According to the FAQ online, this is indicative of having the Office 2003 Web Components from a previous version is installed. Of course! Why didn't I think of that?

Well, this would be fine if it were true in my case. After removing the Office 2003 Web Components via Add/Remove Programs the problem persists. I doubt my OWC components are from a beta of Office.

OK, so what is the setup looking for, and finding, that is causing it to bork like this?

So, I fired up Filemon and Regmon from SysInternals and begin to dig.

FileMon indicated that the setup log file was here:

9:58:15 AM setup.exe:5000 IRP_MJ_WRITE C:\DOCUME~1\shanselm\LOCALS~1\Temp\SetupExe(200611140958151388).log SUCCESS Offset: 0 Length: 78

...and inside that file was

Catalyst beta product conflict check failed. Office Beta product conflict is detected on the computer, productcode={30120000-006E-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE}

...which resulted in this informative message:

...which is a shame, because looking in the registry for 30120000-006E-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE showed me that I some how got the "Office Shared MUI" on my system.

However, it doesn't show up in Add/Remove Programs:

But it does show up when I run the very fabulous MyUnInst from Nirsoft (a must-install tool) along with a few other things like "Microsoft Office Proof," which I assume is the Spellchecker and Grammar tools. I'm not sure WHO installed those or when it happened. Pressing Ctrl-U on these items within MyUnInst started the uninstall process.

Once I removed these strange little things, Office 2007 started to install as expected.

Not the best OOBE (Out Of Box Experience), but I think we can assume my Mom isn't running any Beta stuff like this, so hopefully she won't have a similar experience.

A few interesting asides, if you poke around on the Office 2007 installation media:

• In the root is a folder called Rosebud - this is apparently the codename for Microsoft's new Web Folders implementation, apparently to better support WebDAV and SharePoint 2007. It seems to be an OLEDB Provider for Internet Publishing.
• In one of the setup.xml files there's a line like: <Option Id="OneNoteFiles" DefaultState="Local" DisallowAbsent="no" DisallowAdvertise="no" PreReq="IsEnterprise; IsEnterpriseR; IsHomeStudentR; IsOneNoteHS; IsOneNote; IsOneNoteR; IsUltimate; IsUltimateR; IsMondo"/> and I wonder if "Mondo" is some version of Office that is "bigger and better" than Ultimate?

UPDATE: I got a note from a Microsoft Insider who clued me into why this might have happened to me. Seems I installed a beta of Microsoft Expression Web a while back, and it shares this MSI with other Office componentry. Good to know.

He also shares: "Mondo isn’t some super-secret better-than-best product. It’s an internal-only product we use for test purposes. All current and planned Office suites can be found online at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/FX101635841033.aspx"

Interesting stuff.

UPDATE #2: Be sure to enter your Product Keys when they ask you. Even though you're not required to enter your Product Key until later, if you try to do anything that involves one of the Office 2007 programs accessing the Internet without first entering your Product Key, like downloading a template within Publisher, Word or Excel, you will see this dialog:

Clicking "Get Genuine" will launch your default browser (mine is Firefox, which this website doesn't support, and I got caught in a Javascript page-reload loop and the page reloaded over and over again, so I pasted the URL into IE manually) and tell you basically the same thing:

So, I went back into those two programs and entered my Product Key, which interestingly enough after entering, told me to "Install Now" again. I did, then visited the Genunie Validation page again.

Close, but looks like I need to activate first. So, I closed both apps, and launched them again and was prompted to activate:

...and I was told it was cool. Then I visted the page again:

...and now I'm told that my MSDN key "has been identifed as a false key used with counterfeit copies of Office." That's weird, since I just got it off MSDN and it was just used to activate Office and Visio. This isn't good. I tried again in OneNote:

Now I'm told that I'm not only counterfeit, but I've also used the activation key too many times. I'm not sure which it is, as I'm using the same key (the only key) for all these activations...Office, Visio, OneNote, InfoPath. I thought that one key in Office was one key for the suite, not each app outside of Office Professional. I'm still not able to get any templates off the Internet or download product updates.

Moral: Just enter your Product Key when they ask.

At this point, even though the website says that my copy of InfoPath is not activated and is, in fact, not legit, it does work fine. My copy of OneNote however, will not activate. According on the MSDN Product page, "This product key will activate 10 PCs" - I've only used this key on the one PC, and I just got it today. It's also confusing because MSDN lists two kinds of keys, one for Office 2007 Professional and one for "Office 2007 Desktop Programs."

I'm not sure what to do now. This sucks.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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