How to Manually Remove Office 2000

Office 2000 can be a real pain to manage without the original install CD's or when multiple versions of Office 2000 have been loaded on the PC. Each time a new feature, plugin, or other add-on is applied it will prompt for the CD to load new files. In cases where multiple versions are installed it will sometimes prompt for the wrong CD. This process will completely remove all instances of Office 2000 from the computer and allow you to start fresh with a new install.

Download the Office 2000 Eraser from Microsoft's website. There is an eraser for Disc 1 and Disc 2 so grab them both if you have installed content from Disc 2. I have had best luck going to www.microsoft.com/downloads and doing a search for "eraser".

Run the Office 2000 Eraser(s) and let it delete anything and everything it can find.

Reboot.

The eraser will miss some content on the first pass, so run it again and reboot.

Delete the "C:\Program Files\Office" directory - or alternate location if a custom install was done.

Click Start, Run, and enter Regedit.exe. Delete all entries that reference Office 2000 under the HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall group. They will be at the top of the list and be a long sting of characters bracketed by curly braces.

Reboot.

Now you can reinstall Office 2000 if desired. If it doesn't run properly, click Start, Run, and enter "X:\setup.exe /FV X:\data1.msi" where X is the drive letter or path to the installation CD or files.

A favorite tactic at New Age Digital is to create an install folder right on the user's hard drive, copy the contents of the Office 2000 CD to the folder and run setup from that location. That way the user is never prompted for the CD again. Office will grab whatever content it needs from the hard drive install folder.