Whenever I open a Microsoft Office program (such as Word or Excel) a window appears titled “Windows Installer”. After clicking the “Cancel” button twice the message disappears, but this is quite annoying when I just want to open Word to do some simple word processing. How can I stop the computer from showing this message? The computer is running Windows XP.

A first possible reason for this appearing is that Office is attempting to install some feature whenever you open an Office program. This is likely to be a feature that you don’t use often, otherwise its absence when you cancel the installation and proceed into the program would be noticeable. Nevertheless, even though this is a feature that you don’t use Office is feeling the need to install it anyway, so we should see whether we can allow it to complete the installation so that the Windows Installer message does not continue to appear. Next time you start an Office application and the Windows Installer message appears, allow this to run to completion. Be aware that if a feature does need to be installed, and the relevant files to enable the installation of that feature are not already located on your computer, then you may need to insert the Office CD/DVD so that the relevant files can be copied. As such, it would be worthwhile ensuring that you have that CD/DVD handy should it be needed. Once the Windows Installer has completed its operation it will close and then the Office application should open. At this point close the Office application and then attempt to relaunch the application to check whether the Windows Installer still appears. If not, then it seems some feature was trying to install (and has now been successful) so the installer window should not appear on subsequent attempts to open the Office applications.

However, should the problem continue then the next possibility is that a feature is still trying to install but cannot do so successfully. In this situation we will try reinstalling Office with all features. This should not affect any modifications which you have made to the settings in Office, since they are stored separately to the program files that we are going to be reinstalling through this procedure. The first step is uninstalling Office, so go to the “Start” menu > “Control Panel” and then open the “Add/Remove Programs” control panel. Select the entry for Microsoft Office and then uninstall the software. Once the uninstall process has finished restart the computer to ensure that any remaining files (which may only be removed on restart) are removed. Once the computer has been restarted you can reinstall Office from the original CD/DVD. When you are installing Office you will be presented with various options as to which features and components you would like to install. Make sure that you select a complete (or full) installation which results in all components of Office being installed on your computer. While this may seem wasteful of disk space, since you are installing a lot of components which you probably will not be using, this will ensure that the Windows Installer problem is not related to any missing components of Office. Additionally, in the grand scheme of things, this will not occupy a massive amount of disk space and given the amount of space available on modern hard drives you probably won’t even notice the difference. Once Office has finished installing, check whether the problem still exists.

If the problem still continues then you should next check that Office has the latest updates and patches. This is probably not the case, since we just reinstalled Office from the original installation media (which has likely had software updates released subsequently) so you should visit the Office downloads website (office.microsoft.com/en-au/downloads) to download the latest service packs and updates for your version of Office. This will eliminate a known issue in Office from causing the problem, since the known issues should have been resolved in the Service Pack. It is also recommended that you visit Windows Update (windowsupdate.microsoft.com) and install Microsoft Update, which should be listed on the front page of the Windows Update website. This will allow you to not only update Windows but also other Microsoft applications installed on the computer, such as Microsoft Office. This is quite handy to keep such Microsoft programs up-to-date without having to manually download the updates.

So if we get to this point and the problem remains then we need to look further into what exactly the Windows Installer is trying to do. As part of this investigation we will look into the Event Viewer in Windows. The Event Viewer is essentially the system logging tool found in Windows and records events to do with the system and application, allowing you to review them when troubleshooting problems. If the Windows Installer is looking for something which cannot be found, and subsequently is trying to reinstall that component, then this should be recorded in the Event Viewer. As a starting point, open an Office application to cause the Windows Installer to run (and hopefully record a message within the Event Viewer as to what it’s actually doing). Either let the Windows Installer run to completion or cancel out after it has run for a minute. Then, go to the “Start” menu > “Control Panel” and open the “Administrative Tools” control panel (you may need to click the “Performance and Maintenance” category first). Once in Administrative Tools open the “Event Viewer”. When the Event Viewer is open you will see several different logs in the left-hand pane. We are most interested in the Application and System logs, so look through these at the most recent entries (by timestamp) to check whether any seem related to the Windows Installer. To view the actual details of the log entries you can double-click on an entry, and in the properties window that appears there are arrows allowing you to navigate to the next (and previous) entry without having to close that screen and re-open it specially for the next entry.

Of particular interest is anything which relates to the detection of a product feature failing or found not to be installed. In this case it should give you a path to where it is trying to find that product feature or component, along with the file name that it’s trying to load. This will be the most useful clue in our troubleshooting process since the Event Viewer is telling us what is missing from the system and thus what the Windows Installer is attempting to install every time you open an Office application. Unfortunately without specific details about the file or component name I cannot provide specific advice on how it can be resolved. However, this newly found information will provide you with a very good basis to launch your own research into this topic as you should be able to search using Google (or like) for terms such as “Windows Installer” together with the file or component name, from the event viewer, causing the problem. Of course, if you do still have difficulty finding a resolution then also please feel free to contact me with the new information and I will also conduct some further research in an attempt to find a fix for the problem.