Help me completely uninstall Office 2000

John Wilson · 02-22-2004, 09:01 PM

I need to uninstall office 2000 Professional from WinXP Home without leaving any files behind. I need to do a clean install of Office. I've tried to use the add/remove route but when I reinstall, all of my settings, contacts, calendar events, etc are still there from the previous install. I've found the 2 CD erasers on MS's website but when I tried to use them, they said that they didn't support XP.

I'm thinking that there are some leftover registry entries and other assorted junk but i don't know where to look or what to look for.

Any utilities out there that will help with XP and Office 2000?

Thanks for your help. A reformat of this HD is not possible right now.

Glenn Overholt · 02-22-2004, 09:42 PM

Part of it might be that it gets some of the information from your restore file. You should turn that off and try it again, if you haven't done that.

If you haven't done so already, do a start, right-click explore. It should be gone from your program files but it leaves tracks in lots of other places too. Open up all of the folders and make friends with your delete button. Some things it may refuse to delete, claiming that another program is still using it. You may have to tweak some settings in IE to remove outlook.

As for the registry, it isn't all that bad (just do a backup first).

Have it find 'office', and delete the folders on the left-hand side. You might have to run it again for Word/Excel etc, but it is pretty well organized. Skip the file extensions - which you may run into first.

After a reboot, don't reinstall, but do a 2nd reboot to clear it up. It should do it on it's own, but it might scream back at you.

Glenn

Ted Lee · 02-23-2004, 04:56 PM

i wonder if that's even possible. office is so integrated into the os, that i suspect, unless you do a full reinstall of the os, that you'll never be able to get rid of all the files.

Diallo B · 02-23-2004, 05:13 PM

Quote:

i wonder if that's even possible. office is so integrated into the os, that i suspect, unless you do a full reinstall of the os, that you'll never be able to get rid of all the files.

agreed. and it might take less time to reinstall the OS than look for all those files and edit the registry.

also, if you choose to reinstall look into norton ghost. once you create an image of your drive you will never have to install xp from scratch again. just boot up your image and be done in 10 min.

I keep three images. one with a naked OS with nothing installed but the OS. another one with all my programs and settings installed. and another one that is updated every month.

yeah, its a little bit of work up front but it saves head and heart aches later on.

and the bright side for you is that if you wanted to go back to an OS with no version of Office it will be there for you to load in 10 minutes!

i love ghost.

Mike Fassler · 02-23-2004, 07:29 PM

do an online search for an app called regcleaner, the stuff thats giving you problems are registery entries

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NickSo · 02-24-2004, 06:26 PM

IIRC, Regcleaner only fixes PROBLEMS with the registry (links to non-existent files, etc).

Windows sees the files and entries he wants to get rid of as normal, not problems, so it wouldnt 'fix' them. To remove them he'd ahve to go through the registry and manually remove them...

Mike Fassler · 02-24-2004, 06:47 PM

negative if you actually know how too use regcleaner it does what he will want to as well.

videobruce · 03-07-2004, 09:50 AM

format c:

Quote:

i wonder if that's even possible. office is so integrated into the os, that i suspect, unless you do a full reinstall of the os, that you'll never be able to get rid of all the files.

Couldn't of said it better! That's why I would NEVER use it or any other M$ product OTHER than the O/S!

Wayne Bundrick · 03-07-2004, 12:03 PM

If your contacts and calendar events are still there, it means the uninstall is not erasing the documents and data you've created with Office. That's not a bug, that's a feature, and people would scream bloody murder if uninstalling did erase data. To remove your Outlook emails, contacts, calendar events, etc., you need to find and erase the .pst file you created when you first ran Outlook.