It did not take long after the Office 2010 deployment to receive the first reported error. Although the deployment has been fine on 99% of the installs, during one of them the Windows Installer Service decided to take the day off. It gave this error:
Error 1719: Windows Installer Service could not be accessed.
Normally, this wouldn’t be too terrible, you just start the installation process over again. The problem was that Microsoft Office 2010 thought it had been fully installed. Trying to launch an executable would result in a long string of errors. The first one was this:
Microsoft Word requires the file msointl.dll to run. Run setup again to assure proper installation.
Well, troubleshooting 101 tells us to follow the error’s advice and uninstall and reinstall the software. Of course, that can’t be pain free, so upon trying to uninstall the program through Add/Remove Programs or run the setup again, we receive this error:
The language of this installation package is not supported by your system
So the software isn’t installed enough to operate correctly but it’s too installed to be able to reinstall the software. Great…
Fortunately, there is a Microsoft Fix it for this issue with the Office 2003, Office 2007, and Office 2010 suites. Just download the Fix It file, which comes as a .msi, and run through it. This will go through the uninstallation process and get us out of this situation.
After I ran this Microsoft Fix it on the computer, all traces of Office 2010 were completely removed. I then ran through the deployment process again and this time it completed without any issue. I was happy to find the Microsoft Fix It solution since I felt trapped between a rock and a hard place by not being able to uninstall the corrupted Office installation.