Office 2010 Fails to Install

My customer was having very good success with the installation of Office 2010 across their enterprise.  Initially, they were trying to do an in-place upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2010 and having relatively high failure rates (30 to 40%).  After I pointed out that the best guidance from Microsoft was to remove Office 2003 prior to installing Office 2010 the success rate rose dramatically (to over 95%).  Here is a link to the official guidance from Microsoft: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee624354.aspx.  The good news is that there is reallly no significant downside to doing an uninstall / install.  The uninstall will add several minutes to the overall process, but no data, preferences or settings will be lost.

The customer still reported that the Office 2010 install failed on a small number of their client workstations.  I asked the customer to verify that the machines that had failed had enough available disk space and that they were otherwise similar to the ones that did not have a problem.

Then I wanted to look at was what the installer logs had captured.  The logs are stored in the TEMP directory (type %temp% in the search or run dialog box in the Start menu).  The installer log I wanted to review is called setup###.log where the ### is the date the log was created.

The log is quite long and can be a real challenge to review, but it will often provide the clues to figuring out why the install failed.

I verified that the OS was supported:

This machine is running the 32bit version of Windows XP with service pack 3 which is supported.

The next thing I did was look through the log looking for an error and the resulting Office 2010 rollback event.  One easy way to quickly find the error is to search the log for the word "verbose".  The installer service will automatically switch the logging level from standard to verbose when it begins the rollback process.  You may find the word "verbose" a few times before the rollback, but this search should quickly take you to the right point in the log.  Here is what I found:

 

 Office 2010 was failing to install and generating an error code of 1603 and then rolling back the install.

An error code of 1603 is usually caused by one of a couple things:

1) failure to read from a file location

2) corruption in the WMI database

The first possible cause is often related to the computer's TEMP directory (%temp%).  Another possible problem location is the Microsoft Help directory (%appdata%\Microsoft Help).  I deleted all the files except the setup log from these two locations and also verified that the file permissions were OK (the local system account has to have full rights to these two locations).  I rebooted the computer and started the Office 2010 installer again.  Note:  I could have used the Procmon.exe tool from sysinternals to more deterministically see if these directories were the problem.  Twenty minutes later, I had another failure and the same 1603 error. Drat!

I decided to try repairing the WMI repository.  For Windows XP here is what I did (Vista and Windows 7 use different commands):

From the Start menu>run command line I typed: regdll32 wbemupgd, UpgradeRepository   Note: the spacing and case are important.

This command has no U/I and finishes instantly.  I then checked the log to see what happened.  The log is located at %windir%\system32\wbem\logs\setup.log.

I rebooted the computer and then started the Office 2010 installer.  This time the install completed without issue!

Again, using a tool like Process Monitor would have helped me solve this one even more quickly but considering I had invested all of 45 minutes into the troubleshooting I was pretty happy with solving this one as quickly as I did.

-bruce

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2014
  Do you have the info for the commands that would be needed to repair the WMI repository for Windows 7?