When you cancel an Office 2003 installation, not all registry entries are removed

When you cancel installation of Microsoft Office 2003, you may notice the following behavior. If you compare the registry entries that exist after you stopped the installation with the entries that existed before you started the installation, you find that some registry entries have not been removed.

This problem occurs because when you cancel the installation, the Msocache folder is removed. The Msocache folder is used for the Local Installation Source CAB files during Office 2003 installation. The Msocache folder also contains the information for the Improved Error Reporting and Extended Error Messages (with additional help) features. When you cancel the installation, the Improved Error Reporting and Extended Error Messages files are removed when the Local Installation Source files are removed. However, the registry keys that point to the files for these two features are not removed.

To resolve this problem, manually remove the registry keys that point to the Improved Error Reporting and Extended Error Messages files.

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: To remove these registry keys, follow these steps:

1. Quit all Office programs.
2. Click Start, and then click Run.
3. In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.
4. In Registry Editor, select the following subkey (folder): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Delivery\SourceEngine\Downloads\microsoft.watson.alrtintl.data
5. Right-click microsoft.watson.alrtintl.data, and then click Delete.
6. Select the following subkey (folder): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Delivery\SourceEngine\Downloads\microsoft.watson.watsonrc.data
7. Right-click microsoft.watson.watsonrc.data, and then click Delete.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.