SOLVED Vista 64 Registry permmissions and Office

[marcplante]

There's a writeup of the solution to this problem at the bottom of the thread. Thank again to MechBgon for the extra bit to get me over the hump. I was on the verge of rebuilding the OS to reset the registry.

REMEMBER TO BACK UP YOUR REGISTRY! Though in a way, that wouldn't have helped me since it was hosed to begin with.

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I was trying to help my wife solve a problem with recurring EULA display for MS office on her new Vista Premium 64 notebook by adding permissions using regedi, by an article similar to one posted here:

Problem is that I was following her verbal instructions from across a room. In retrospect, I should have rea the article myself.

Following her instructions, I looked at the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry, but did not see a key for Microsoft office 11 as the instructions indicated. There WAS such a key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. this key already seemed to have Full Access permissions. MY wife's response was to say: "Then turn them off," since the article she was reading alluded to turning permissions in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE off after updating the office install.

Unfortunately removing permissions seems to have permanently affected my ability to reinstall or access the application.

Is there a way to reassign ownership of the permissions in HKEY_CURRENT_USER /software/Microsoft/office to my wife's user name (she's also admin) so that I can turn them back on? I'm currently denied access

Thank you,

 

[mechBgon]

Have you tried a System Restore yet?

 

[marcplante]

Yes, but there's nothing "wrong" with the system to be recovered. There's just a misconfirguration in the permissions of one of the keys that keeps me from running or updating a certain piece of software.

I've also tried using registry cleaning tools to delete this artifact of an "Old" software installation since I was able to uninstall the software, though it left items in the registry. I've tried manually deleting the key, but, or course, I don't have permission to.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
Have you tried a System Restore yet?

SR doesnt roll back user profiles.

 

[mechBgon]

If you weren't already doing this, run regedit by right-clicking it and choosing Run as administrator from the right-click menu, so you've got full Admin powers on hand to change permissions with.

 

[marcplante]

THANK YOU mechBgon! I'm writign this up a bit for thoase that may follow. Also...quick question"

I notice that some of the folders have a RESTRICTED entry in the ownership with read only access. Does this need to be cleared? or can I leave it as long as the live user on the PC has privileges?

Installing an MS app on an MS OS shouldn't be this messy. Even without this mistake, I don't think typical install instructions should ever include the word "regedit." I'd done some basic registry fiddling when building and testing browser installs for an ISP in the mid 90s, but this was a pretty deep dive to install MS Office on Windows Vista Premium 64

I had a series of problems installing MS Office 2003 on my Windows Vista Premium. The initial install seemed fine, but I was given an End User License Agreement (EULA) every time I opened an Office application. There is a problem in the registry where Office can not write the flag that these have been accepted. Microsoft's solution is to send a user mucking around in the registry. you can try to right click on the installation "Setup" icon to run as admin, but that doesn't seem to work universally based on articles I've read around the web.

My primary user didn't have adequate permission to install the software, so I would get an Error 1402 during the install process at the point where it tried to write to the registry.


Upon playing with the permissions, I got tangled up, and I've documented below my solution below

I had to fiddle with key ownership and permissions to get this to work by running regedit and going into HKEY-CURRENT_USER /software to find the "Office folder." In that folder was another folder labeled "11")(Yours may be "12" if you're running office 2007). This is where my problem lived More details on the fundamentals of this edit are in the link at the top of this thread.

I seemed to be in a loop where I couldn't push permissions down from the parents, so I had to go into each low level folder and break the parental dependency to reset ownership and privileges in the "advanced" tab.

Go to start

Type regedit in the search window
Right click on Regedit that comes up and run as administrator
Open HKEY_CURRENT_USER
click into "Software" folder
click into "Office" folder
click into the 11 (Office 2003) or 12 folder (Office 2007)
Right click on the first folder inside "common" and select permissions.

click on advanced
select ownership tab to confirm that the user owns the folder
click on advanced and make sure that the user has full write privileges
Make sure there are entries for "administrator" and "SYSTEM" with full write privilieges

You may have a problem with being able to attach privileges to a user because of dependencies on a parent folder. You can click on the box linking the dolder to the attribuesto parent folder to break the relationship

I went into the advanced tab of the permissions window and break the dependency on parent permission inheritance, then re-added "SYSTEM," "<user name>" and "administrator," giving them each full privileges in the advanced tab. I repeated this for the Office folder under HKEY_CURRENT USER /software and all of the subfolders for each application (word, Excel, powerpoint, outlook and the common folder). At first I only added the user name and administrator, but I guess it makes sense that you need to give the system privileges to make changes.

This is a little garbled, but the kids are screaming. I hope this mini-write up helps someone else. This was a mess (especially with an impatient wife and two young critters around).