Office 2003 Set Up Error 1402......

As my title says, I am trying to re-install my Office 2003 Professional on XP SP2 laptop that I needed to format 2 days ago due to some problem. Office and laptop was working fine earlier but now it is just not allowing me to re-install Office suite. Whenever I start the installation, it gives me an error saying

“Error 1402, Setup cannot open the registry key UNKNOWN\.wll. Verify that you have sufficient permissions to access the registry or contact your information technology dept. for assistance.”

I noticed that it happens when the program tries registering extension servers. Anyways, I tried to get this installation successful in safe mode, via clean boot and many more ways, but nothing helped yet. Can anyone please suggests something ?

Though you might be the only Administrator of the system where you getting this error but many times such problem occurs where we any software wont get the full permission to read/write registry entries. In such cases you need to edit Opa12.dat file. Permissions are actually saved here.

This file will be located to at “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Data\Data.dat” but to reach here you will need to make settings for ‘Show Hidden files and folders’ and ‘Unhide extensions’ by going to Organis > View Tab in your Windows Explorer.

For more help on this, you can also check this KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/838687/en-us

Thanks for the help and KB URL LeonL but I already tried those steps, none of then worked for me.

Any other suggestions please ?

Well I’ll suggest you to completely remove all office programs, installation files and its registry keys from your system and try re-installing the program again. Am sure there would not be any problem in the installation disk, there is just some conflict in the system itself. Hence, you should visit here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2639197 and download Windows Installer Cleanup Utility, install in on your computer, launch and select each and every file associated with “Office 12”. Remove them all, restart your computer and try installing the product again. Hopefully you shouldn’t be getting problems anymore.

I will not recommend this to anyone but this is how I was able to fix the problem on my system. What I did was gone to RUN, typed ‘regedit’ to bring up the registry. Here we need to search for the keys that read .wll. or Unkown. We need to right click them and select Permissions and set the system permission to full access by check marking the boxes. This solved my problem.

Really late post here, but what worked for me is just adding the name "everyone" with full control to the entire "windows" (HKLM_software_microsoft_windows) folder, then selected "advanced" and checked "replace permission entries on all child objects" or something alone those lines in the registry.
Good luck if anyone is still having this issue!

xp home edition by the way..

thanks. I tried that but it didn't work. I also tried the "Fix it" program from Microsoft and it didn't work. Still working on it.

FYI: I also tried the Windows Installer Cleanup as well as the suggestions. Neither of these worked for me. I tried so many things but ultimately had to restore to all my attempts so that I would have a working copy of the programs.

Bottom line: So far, I cannot reinstall, repair, or uninstall 2003 Pro. I also cannot install 2010 OVER it. I always get the "...corrupted...please reinstall or uninstall..." Hours wasted. Reminded why I hate Microsoft.