Office 2003 Media Required for Uninstall of Application?

It’s always ticked me off the way Microsoft Office requires the install CD to do any number of seemingly minor things. Today though I was surprised to see an all new “feature”: I was working on a laptop that had Outlook 2003 installed, and I had signed up the owner for a hosted Exchange account and wanted to install Outlook 2007. Sure, I could install over top, but why not do an uninstall and keep things clean? I tried to uninstall Outlook 2003, but it wouldn’t uninstall without the Office 2003 install CD. What kind of lunacy is this? You should *never* need an install CD to remove a program – that’s idiotic on every level possible.

4 thoughts on “Office 2003 Media Required for Uninstall of Application?”

  1. 1. Visioneer does the same dumb stuff.

    2. In the future, if you install Office 2k3, make sure the last check box isn’t ticked. If the install files are cached on the drive, you never need the media. If they aren’t then you do, even (bizarrely enough) for the uninstall.

  2. Yeah, I usually leave them cached on the drive, but this wasn’t my laptop nor do they have the Office 2003 install CD any more (that they could find). I managed to get Outlook 2007 on there anyway, even though during the install of 2007 it asked for the CD of Office 2003. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

  3. I was doing a search for completely remove office 2003 and came accross your blog, I’ve seen it before in other searches. I’m an IT Manager for a small company … I guess my searching takes me in your direction. My 2 cents are Microsoft needs a new button – one that say something like “I really really want to remove this software yeah all of it, even the hidden parts” Or they could just have the uninstall button do what it says it will do and have another button that says something like ” I want to kinda uninstall this software, I would like to keep pieces of it around to waste space and cause me problems in the future”
    Nice blog!!!

    Kirk – thepoweroflove.us

  4. Thanks for the comment Kirk – you’re right, it’s bizarre and frustrating that the remove process doesn’t actually do what it says… 🙁

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