No Office Assistant character files

I am using Office 2002 Suite but only for MS Excel, Word and PPT. For mailing purpose I installed Outlook 2003. But since I installed Outlook whenever I open word, excel or PPT 2002, it quits with the following error message:

"There is no Office Assistant character files present on the system. Please run Setup in maintenance mode and install at least one character."

I found somewhere that we can disable Office Assistant from the registry, and they have mentioned the following steps:

• Navigate to
  HKEY_LOCAL_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\[version]\Common\Assistant
• Select each key within the details pane and click Delete from the Edit menu. You must delete each DWORD value within the key.
• Close the Registry Editor

Well I did the same but yet dint found the Assistant folder in the common folder. Someone of you can help me out with this problem ?

Did you tried repairing the Office again after installing Outlook ? if not, do it now from the Add and Remove Program > select Office> chose Repair or Modify.

Also note that while trying to repair you may come through a list to install or uninstall. You must see Office Assistant listed over here. If it is there simply uninstall it. This should fix the problem.