Office 2003 SP1 Failing Using Office Update Site

Not too long ago I ran into an interesting issue with applying Office 2003 (inc. Project 2003 and Visio 2003) Service Pack 1 through the Office Update site.

The update would kick-off then after a short while it would fail miserably with the error “update was unsuccessful”.

When Office 2003 was installed I ensured that the source files were kept on the local drive, so not being able to locate these was not the issue and as this was a ‘clean’ install the Registry settings weren’t pointing to an invalid location.

There were however several Event Viewer entries such as the one below:

The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( OfficeUpdateV3 ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: V3_2511485INSTALLMSO11_1399_INTL2004-07-15 16:29:059FAIL00000000 The operation completed successfully..

Based on this I assumed that something had gone awry during the installation of Office. So having ‘repaired’ the installation I tried Office Update again… still the same error. Next option… a complete uninstall and re-install… still no joy… So as a last resort I tried the Full File downloads instead of using Office Update… they worked! Why I have no idea (yet) but it works. So if you have the same proble, you now know what to do!

You can get the Office 2003 SP1 Full-File downloads from:

Office 2003:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9c51d3a6-7cb1-4f61-837e-5f938254fc47&DisplayLang=en

OneNote 2003:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=07408348-26c9-43bb-9e7e-6151cf15d415&DisplayLang=en

Project 2003:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1b04c073-e58f-4f42-b76d-6b565a45cdc3&DisplayLang=en

Visio 2003:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=afca0578-e1fb-4540-b0cc-ff83def61cc6&DisplayLang=en

(you want the FullFile downloads NOT the Client downloads)