MS Office Live: Grrrrrr

[LeMarchand]

So, I (foolishly) installed (pretty much) the "full set" of MS Updates, including the "Live" set, just before capturing/deploying a new image across one of my schools. Now every time someone opens Word (and probably every Office (2003) program) they are confronted with the "Get Started" screen (even if the "do not show again" box is checked).

 

MS seem to know about this and have released a registry hack to cure the problem see here. Unfortunately this only seems to work in HKCU (and possibly in HKU\.DEFAULT, which would - AFAIK - only help for people who hadn't called up an Office program yet). The MS "Autofix" doesn't seem to work retrospectively, either.

 

Now, I could create a new "fixed"/Live-free image and deploy it but I just haven't got the time. Does anyone have a fix that works or can think of some cunning way to do something via GPO to fix or remove Office Live?

[SYNACK]

I did something simmilar accidently and made a machine startup script that removed the offending rubbish on startup.

 

Microsoft Corporation

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
   & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

Set colSoftware = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
   ("Select * from Win32_Product Where Name = 'Personnel database'")

For Each objSoftware in colSoftware
   objSoftware.Uninstall()
Next

 

Worked well, used it to kill Acrobat 9 too - horrible rubbish that was.

[LeMarchand]

Cheers! I'm there on Monday and will give it a go.

[LeMarchand]

Was about to try the proposed solution, but was a bit worried that my script translation skills weren't up to it. On a last-ditch search I finally came across a domain-suitable solution here.

 

It involves exporting the Office Live registry key from an account without the problem and adding a line to your logon script to check for the key's presence and add it in if it's not there. Seems to work fine and was easier for me to grasp. Of course, whether it is worth keeping Office Live is still debatable!