a clean uninstall utility

[Yankees]

anyone have one for Office that removes all traces of
Office so when you reinstall it it doesn't put back the
old user settings and profile?

 

[Guest]

If you download the Office 2003 Resource Kit there is a tool called Custom
Installation Wizard. This will create a custom transform file which Office
will use to install the application. You can customize almost every aspect of
prior to even installing it. One of the options is to make a clean install
which removes everything prior to installation, even profiles if you want it
to. Although, i'd watch out for the profiles since many users have their
PST's in there profile.

 

[Yankees]

thanks, I had already downloaded that utility but I
haven't tried it yet. I'll give it a shot but is it a
problem to clean uninstall on a machine that the wizard
wasn't already run on?

 

[Guest]

The wizards puprose is to allow the administrator to create a baseline image
with all the settings configured at install time. One of the ways to make
sure that the installation is clean is to use the feature in the wizard to
uninstall all previous versions of Office as well as profiles. The wizard
will create a .mst file that you will then need to use while installing the
setup.exe or whatever you'll use. if you look in the .ini file for the setup
you'll see an option where you can include a .mst file, which is the file
that has all your settings and configurations built-in. With regards to your
question, "I'll give it a shot but is it a problem to clean uninstall on a
machine that the wizard wasn't already run on?" Like I explained above, the
wizard is an install time configuration tool and therefore I see no relation
between the clean uninstall and the wizard being run on the system (which
isn't possible). I would take a look at the Office 2k3 Resource kit
documentation, there are a lot of options that are available with the tools
it provides.