Messed up clients with Win Installer and GPO

[MarcoM]

Hello,
I think I messed up my XP clients by playing around with Office XP
installations in Group Policy.

On some machines there was Office preinstalled.
On all users I Assigned Office without the admin Install.
removed Office from GPO with the option of not remove it from machines
Done an admin instal on the share point, with key.
Assigned Office to Machines
Removed that too with the option of not remove it from machines
Assigned it again to all users.

The result:
Office keep installing every user log on mani machines.
On some user say "Cannot instal software. You neet to have administratir
privileges..." and don't start.
On other users keep installing asking the CD key
Even if Office is installed, clicking the Word icon try to re-install Office
and sometime fails.
Even taking away the published/assigned packages from the GPO the situation
don't change.

Question:
There is a way to clean up the GPO (I noticed that deleted packages are
still part of the GPO found on SYSVOL) and clean up Windows Installer
clients registry entries of so that if the program is installed, it get
executed instead of re-installed?

Thanks for any suggestion!

Marco Malatesta

 

[Cary Shultz]

-----Original Message-----

Office XP Enterprise

Okay, good. Sometimes with the way things can change in
this industry you can not ass\u\me anything.

Yes. Some of the machines where new, and they had Office

XP installed.

Came out of the box from Dell or HP ( Compaq ) or whomever
loadd with WINXP And Office XP??

And so you wanted - as I would have - to have a nice
uniform environment. I can appreciate this. This way
most of the "figuring out how this was installed
and 'Where is that dang disk?'" no longer apply. I do not
know how many times I have gone to a clients site to do
something and they do not have the Office 2000 / Office XP
Disc 1!!!!! One of the beauties of having an
Administrative installation point - no more need for the
CD! Well...

When you remove from a GPO an application assigned, you have the
option of removing it from the clients or just let the clients that have it
installed
to keep it.

Understood. You are talking about the ability to either
completely delete the GPO or to simply remove the link.
Also, remember that Software installed via GPO is not
subject to Background Policy Processing...The user needs
to actually log off and then back on before the software
would be removed ( or - if assigned to the computer
configuration - the computer needs to be restarted ).
That makes sense, right. I mean, Joe User is creating an
Excel Spreadsheet of all the billable hours you have at
his company and you go and delete the GPO that installed
Office XP. Some 60 minutes later - if Backgroup Policy
Processing applied to software installations via GPO - all
of a sudden Office XP disappears from his computer...and
you know that he has not yet saved that Excel
spreadsheet! You do not get paid this week!

Office Eraser would be great, if also clean Windows Installer registry keys.
An application that completely remove registry entries made by Group
policies
is what I'm looking, as I don't think that deleting the GPO the client
machines
clean up the registry by themself. I thing Windows Installer still follow
group
policy and automatically try to install uninstalled components. But I didn't
try.

I can not state 100% for sure that this will remove all
registry entries. It is pretty good, though. I do know
that when I have used Office Eraser it typically removes
around 15MB of additional files from the local
computer...including some registry entries. However,
please note that I have typically used it in situations
where Office 2000 was installed via the Office 2000 Disk 1
CD to the computer and I wanted things clean for the GPO
installation...

20

Okay, so this is manageable. Granted, it is a pain in the
arse for these 20 people. But, at least it is not 300!

Thank you for your valuable informations!
marco

You are welcome.