[idrawstuff]

About a year ago, we had a 19 year old MCSE working for us, and he installed Office XP on seven workstations across the company. Recently we discovered that our Office XP installs were pirated, and we bought some Office 2003 licenses to correct the problem.

However, no matter what I try, Office XP reinstalls itself after reboot. I've tried removing it through the Office 2003 installation wizard, through the control panel, by running the Office Clean utility that came with Office 2003, using the Windows Install Cleanup Utility, and nothing works!

I'm by no means a computer pro, but I have the funny feeling something in my registry was either corrupted or manually changed by the shady MCSE to force it to take the cracked copy of Office XP. Any ideas on how I could proceed?

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Have a look in your list of 'startup' applications which automatically start with Windows. One of them could be the installer for Office XP.
You can view all your startup items, regardless of whether they are triggered by the Registry or from the 'Startup' folder, by downloading this free utility, "Startup Control Panel" from here: http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

[pip22]

Have a look in your list of 'startup' applications which automatically start with Windows. One of them could be the installer for Office XP.
You can view all your startup items, regardless of whether they are triggered by the Registry or from the 'Startup' folder, by downloading this free utility, "Startup Control Panel" from here: http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

[idrawstuff]

I checked it out through MSCONFIG and I didn't run into anything, but your train of thought put me on another search that I verified this morning, and...

I got it.

The old IT guy had deployed Office XP on the server, which was sending Office XP "install-on-demand" shortcuts to our workstations every time we logged on to the network.

We've called in a professional to dismantle the installer. Thought I'd keep you guys posted in case this happens to anyone else.

[coachwife6]

Thanks for letting us know and I'm glad you got it sorted out.