You cannot remove service packs for Office 2003 products or 2007 Office products

When you try to remove a Microsoft Office 2003 service pack or a pre-Service Pack 2 2007 Microsoft Office service pack from your computer, and then you try to revert to your original installation of Office 2003 or your original installation of 2007 Office, you cannot remove the service pack.

For example, when you click Service Pack 1 for Office 2003 in the Currently installed programs and updates list of the Add or Remove Programs dialog box, the Remove button does not appear. This behavior occurs by design in Office 2003 service packs and 2007 Office service packs. If the service pack was removed, your Office 2003 installation or 2007 Office installation may be left in an unstable state.

To remove Office 2003 service packs or 2007 Office service packs from your computer, you must remove all the Office 2003 programs or all the 2007 Office programs, and then reinstall all the Office 2003 programs or all the 2007 Office programs from your original Office 2003 CD-ROM or your original 2007 Office CD-ROM.

To remove the Office 2003 programs or the 2007 Office programs from your computer, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
2. Click Add or Remove Programs.
3. In the Currently installed programs list, click the Microsoft Office 2003 edition or the 2007 Microsoft Office suite that you have installed, and then click Remove.
4. Click Yes when you are prompted to remove Office 2003 or 2007 Office from your computer.

Note If you have other Office 2003 programs or other 2007 Office programs installed on your computer as stand-alone programs (not installed as part of the Office 2003 edition or the 2007 Office suite), you may also have to remove those programs.

Traditionally, Office service packs cannot be uninstalled. For SP2 for the 2007 Office Desktop products, a uninstall command line tool lets users uninstall an Office service pack release from a computer. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Although SP2 for the 2007 Office Desktop products can be uninstalled, you cannot uninstall 2007 Office Servers Service Pack 2 for Office server products. The main reason for this is that the installation of 2007 Office Server Service Pack 2 makes changes to back-end databases, and those database changes are currently unable to be reverted. So, generally, the service pack files themselves cannot be reverted. This keeps users from getting into a bad state.

For more information Office 2003 service pack or a 2007 Microsoft Office service pack, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: