Help me get office XP off my computer!

August 22, 2005 8:04 AM

Help me get office XP off my computer!

I have been using Office XP (On a Win XP machine) and I recently upgraded to Office 2003. But whenever I launch Outlook 2003 I get prompted that a feature I am trying to use is on the Office XP CD and please insert the disc. Unfortunately, I am missing one of the Office XP installation discs, and it is apparently the one it wants (Yes, this is a 100% legitimate copy. I go to a university with an agreement with Microsoft making it too cheap not to get a legitimate copy.) So Outlook won’t run. When I try and go to uninstall Office XP from the Add and Remove programs I get the same prompt for the CD, and it won’t uninstall without it. This is so frustrating! I can’t use the new version of Outlook or uninstall the old Office because of a missing CD. Any ideas short of purchasing another copy of Office XP? (And please, I don’t need recommendations for other programs right now. I am well aware of my options.)

posted by Tallguy to computers & internet (4 comments total)

So, is this a computer you bought from the university? If so, you could probably go see the helpdesk... they'll surely have the disc. If it's a laptop, you could just bring it, pop the disc in, fix it and go.

(there are some suggestions on usenet, like this one, but I personally wouldn't want to mess with that.)
posted by selfnoise at 8:33 AM on August 22, 2005

If you run this tool from Microsoft you should be able to uninstall Office (I haven't tried this).
posted by null terminated at 8:54 AM on August 22, 2005

I had the exact same problem (I have a tendency to lose expensive CDs), and I've got some bad news for you. Nothing I tried would get Office off, even the above tool from Microsoft. I went as far as to try and find all the Office XP registry entries and delete them by hand, but I still got the damn "Insert the Office XP CD to Uninstall" every time I went to use Outlook.

In the end, I backed up my work and formatted the contents of the hard drive, and re-installed Windows. That might not be the best answer, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure this problem out, and I found no soloution.
posted by SweetJesus at 10:22 AM on August 22, 2005

Borrow an Office CD off a friend/acquaintance/neighbour/coworker and use that to uninstall.
posted by rjt at 11:54 AM on August 22, 2005