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Issues with W2K MSI

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by jafa 1 view

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Just recently clients on our network running 2000 started acting up. Suddenly application shortcuts on the desktop would start the MSI installer trying to reinstall the app. Office XP in perticular. The MSI will error out. Errors would say no association for application...change association in control panel etc. Others would say "Outlook not installed on machine for this user, would you like to reinstall" then error out trying to install. All machines were working fine one minute then crap out the next. It's not happening all at once either they are getting "hit" at random. If they try to open an excel file, same thing... it trys to install excel. We were wondering if there was an SMS update causing this problem but main headquarter support is baffled too. So far we have 10 affected PC's and losing another every couple of hours or so. XP machines are not being affected. Has anyone seen this happen before? Currently reimaging is the only fix we have but how do we know if this problem will continue to perpetuate? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

5 replies

by bfilmfan

I didn't see any mention of a virus scan of the systems. Did you scan the systems?

by jafa

Thought about that first. Running Trend Office. Full scan shows no virus. Techs from Trend scratching their heads too. Seems to be possibly related to SMS. PC's act like apps are being ran for the first time and trying to re-install.

by cg it

user profiles most likely. If Office is installed locally on the PC using the admin account, and other users log on and try to use a program, it will install like an initial install. Will do it for each user who logs onto that machine.

Another avenue to explore is published or advertised via network GPO. Someone may have mucked around with a GPO software deployment for users and either changed it from user defined to computer defined or vice versa so that users opening up the program are seen as first time users and the program installs.

The 2 suggestions above are just that suggestions. Don't know how you make programs available to users e.g. computer or network and how the network is setup e.g. software deployment via GP is done to the computer or to the user.

You say random hits but GP refresh isn't immediate and is done at a set interval with an offset time or done when a computer is rebooted or a user logs off and then back on. Because of that I tend to think its a GP issue and the randomness is the GP refreshing, a force refresh GP, users loggin off/on etc.

by rindi1

It could be you have received an Office-Update. As far as I know there is a new office servicepack around. Office updates or servicepacks often result in a similar message as the one you mentioned. The installation may not work properly because the logged on user may not have enough user rights. Log on to those PCs as Administrator and start an Office Program to kick off the installation process.

by ciscoguy69

We are also expiriencing this. So far I have found that the system has lost the profiles and so they are not being updated. How, I do not know but several registry entries are changed for the System account as this event occurs. As a temporary fix, you can set a system environment variable SystemDrive to c: which forces the system to see the profiles. After that, you can take the HKCU registry entries from office and apply them as the user which will reset it to factory. Please let me know if you find anything as we are struggling with its root cause now.

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