Outlook and OE Adress Book and Word in Office 2000

Using Windows XP Home and Office 2000 Professional. Office Update fails. "Office Update is unable to check for updates". It did get past the check for genuine Microsoft Products.

My original two problems that I am trying to resolve by updating Office are:

1. When starting Word, “Preparing to install" window flies by and I get the following Microsoft Word 10.0 window with message "An error occurred and this feature is no longer functioning properly. Please run Setup and select "Repair..." to restore this application."
I select the only option "OK" and then Word (Word 2002 (10.6843.6839) SP3) opens nicely.

I used the original CD to run setup and "Repair" which completed successfully but the error messages still comes up.
I removed Microsoft Office using the CD and then reinstalled it and still have the same error messages.

Also, the “Preparing to Install” message from Windows Installer comes up at a lot of very odd times for no apparent reason. It always goes away very quickly. I downloaded Windows Installer 3.1 and tried again to no avail and it still starts up on its own a lot.

2. In Outlook 2000 whenever the address book is accessed when attempting to send an email or by selecting TOOLS/AddressBook, or by opening a received message, I get the following error message: “An error occurred while attempting to open the address book.”
I renamed wab32.dll in Windows/System32/dllcache and then downloaded another albeit older version of wab32.dll to that location, but that didn’t help.
Mine is Version 6.0.2900.3138 from 11.08/2006 and the downloaded one is 6.0.2800.1106 for 12/06/2003.

The .wab files I found are: DEFAULT.WAB, DEFAULT (1).WAB both of which are 173 KB. I renamed them to .old but I still get the same problem.

2.a In Outlook express (which I use for NewsGroups) the error message I get is “The address book failed to load. Outlook Express is incorrectly configured, please re-install.” Followed by “There was an error opening this message. An error has occurred.” I tried to delete and reinstall OE that but am not sure I was successful.
In Add/Remove utility I selected Windows Components on the left, but the outlook express box was already unchecked.
So I checked it and continues on, then unchecked it and continues successfully, but not sure it was every really uninstalled.

Anyway I can't send or open email and mucking about with the *.wab files and the wab32.dll file do not seem to fix my problem.
Is it the registry that is messed up? I recently did a lot of cleanup and have scanned the registry with some scanners but have not altered the registry in any way except with CCleaner as I was not willing to pay.

I can read email in the preview pane.