Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 encountered an error during setup.

I’ve been using Office XP Professional for several years and haven’t seen any reason to upgrade. Anything that was sent to me in a newer version of Word or Excel could be converted to work with Office XP. That is, until last week when a client sent me an Excel spreadsheet that had drop shadows in it. Apparently this was too much for Office XP and I didn’t see the shadows which caused a bit of a communication error as to what the client wanted to see in a certain website design. I figured that was enough justification to pay $170 or so for the Office 2007 upgrade, which I promptly ordered.

However, in the three days since I received the upgrade to Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 I have been unable to install it due to an error that keeps popping up saying “Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 encountered an error during setup.”

I’ve tried everything. I’ve searched and scoured the Internet, I’ve tried every trick anyone has suggested. I’ve uninstalled portions of Office XP, updates, and finally uninstalled it altogether. I’ve tried customizing the installation to no effect. No matter what I’ve done the disc runs to a certain point as though everything is going fine and then spits out that Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 encountered an error during setup error and that’s the end of it. No further details are provided. There is no error code and nothing to provide a clue as to what I need to do to get this to work.

I run Windows XP Professional and the only component of Office I haven’t uninstalled is Outlook because I use a special configuration of Outlook 2007 that’s provided by my hosted Exchange email provider. But I also skip upgrading any Outlook components, so theoretically that shouldn’t be an issue.

And so here I am, down to my last option which is to trust in the power of blogging and search engines to bring me the answer I desire. It’s worked before, maybe it will work again.