System Restore Failure and Office 2007 Problems

It all started when I was using Revo/Uninstall to uninstall Office 2010 from my hard drive. I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium. I have installed a licensed copy of Office 2007 (Student Edition), which was working just fine.

Revo identified 2 registry entries that I believed applied to 2010 that could be deleted as part of the uninstall procedure. I told it to delete the entries and then, having second thoughts, I canceled the uninstall. I saw, however, that the icon for Office 2010 had disappeared from my list of "All Programs" (although certain related Windows 2010 icons still remain.)

I attempted an "System Restore" only to find that the "System Restore" function for each of my hard drive partitions was set to "off." When I tried to turn them on, I got the following messsages:

"Could not apply the settings for the following reason:
"The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. (0x8007007B)"

Followed by:

"There was an unexpected error in the property page:

"The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. (0x8007007B)

"Please close the property page and try again."

I read in some of these forums that third-party uninstallers may screw up the System Restore function. Apparently Revo is one of these.

Moreover, when I now try to use work on my Excel and Word files in Office 2007, the OS wants to "Configure" those programs for me, including (but not mandating) that I enter my Product Key number for Office 2007. I can do this, but I'm already using my max 3-licenses.

So at this point I have a System Restore function that does not work, a still-installed version of Office 2010 that I want to uninstall but can't (as it no longer shows up in the list of programs eligible to be uninstalled, presumably because of the registry deletions), and a valid copy of Office 2007 that wants to "Configure" every time I use it (does this mean it thinks I'm operating under a time-limited trial period?).

My questions, then, are:

1) In what order should I try to fix these problems?

2) What do I need to do to get my System Restore fully functional again? (Many solutions on these boards involved doing something with Norton -- I've previously uninstalled Norton, so that option isn't available to me.)

3) Will restoring the 2 deleted registry entries (whatever they may have been -- I could use advice on that as well) a) bring back the OS's recognition of the still-installed Office 2010 program, so that I can uninstall it and get it completely off my hard drive; and b) re-recognize that my Office 2007 is as configured and properly registered as I need it to be?

4) Or is there some other approach entirely that I need to take?

Sorry for the excessive length of this post. I'd appreciate any help you can offer.

OK. I think I have the System Restore function taken care of.

That still leaves me with the issues of trying to get my Office 2007 functioning without automatically trying to configure the programs as if it had been freshly installed, and of trying to get Office 2010 off my computer now that it's no longer recognized on the "All Programs" list.

Any help/suggestions?

Thanks

Maybe try Revo uninstaller.

You can run a repair of Office in the Programs and Features option in Control Panel. Maybe repairing Office 2007 would also eliminate the remaining parts of 2010.

Dear Help and Salt -- Thanks for your responses.

HelpifIcan -- I was using Revo Uninstaller when I created the problem for myself. Revo identified some registry entries that I told it to delete as part of the uninstall process based on my belief that those entries were associated only with Office 2010. Once they had been deleted, Revo showed me another screen that caused me to be concerned that certain files that I had created using Office 2007 had become co-mingled with Office 2010 files. At that point I aborted the uninstall, but the registry entries were already gone and there is no way of which I am aware to get them back. I typically use Revo, and have only learned by reading this discussion board that it apparently can sometimes screw up Windows' ability to create a restore point. As I indicated, I believe that I have (for now) rectified the restore point issue.

Saltgrass -- Thanks also for your suggestion. I tried to run the "Repair" function on Office 2007, but "Repair" was not made available to me for that program. It is still the case that, whenever I open Excel or Word 2007, the Office program wants me to enter my product license and to "Configure" office for me. I have not yet entered the license number. I expect that, when I do, it will tell me that that license is already in use. I suppose, then, that I will have to use the Windows 7 uninstall program to uninstall Office 2007, which should free up the license. Then I will need to re-install it. A pain, to be sure, but if all goes as it should, I may at least get rid of the nuisance of having Office 2007 programs pester me each time I want to use them.

I'm a little surprised that Microsoft Office 2010 and 2007 both seem to use at least some of the same registry entries, especially (if this matters) since I installed Office 2007 on a different partition than the C: drive on which 2010 came installed.

Anyway, thanks again to both of you. I'm still open to any other suggestions before I undertake an uninstall and reinstall of Office 2007.

Hi roth,

I've not seen (in the past) where it asks you to enter your "key", but I've seen where everytime I've started Word it wants to configure it first. This, saved as a reg file and merged into the registry, has stopped it for me in the past.

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options]
"NoReReg"=dword:00000001

There's a couple of clean up tools/slash vbs scripts at this link that should remove 2010, but you may have to re-run the Office 2007 install again as I'm pretty certain they use some of the same addresses/folder locations.

Hee! Hee! Forgot the link! http://www.mediafire.com/?70wxh4nx7ym0mp8

Hope that helps a bit.

N.B. This works for Office 2010 as well, you need to change the 12.0 in the reg key name to 14.0

Hi

Try reinstalling Office 2010 and then uninstall it again and let it finish using Windows uninstaller.
The problem was probably caused when you stopped the uninstall process part way through.

Reinstalling it may replace the registry entries that were removed and let you finish the process.

Mike

I haven't had time yet to experiment with the suggestions Elmer made, but --

Mike -- Thanks for the suggestion. My problem at this point is that I don't know of a way to reinstall Office 2010. It came pre-packaged with the Windows 7 edition that was already installed on my computer (an Acer). There is an Acer recovery program that I've never used before. If I had to completely reinstall Windows 7 (thereby re-setting my computer to the factory settings, the damage would be minimal -- I've partitioned my hard drive so that most of my applications (including Office 2007) and data are not on the C: drive, and presumably a complete Windows 7 reinstall would only affect the C: drive.

Forgive my ignorance, but is there a way to use the Acer recovery program to selectively re-install Office 2010? If so, that may be an easy way to go.

Thanks again to everyone for all your help.

My guess is that the restore is an automatic process that will restore everything and not allow you to make any choices.

I did my computer recently from the disks from Falcon and it just zipped through and in about 20 minutes everything was back to the day I got it.

I recommend to everyone that they get an external hard drive (they are cheap now) and back up all important files before doing anything drastic, I don't think that the built in system restore will restore the partitions but I would check to be sure.