Uninstalling Office 97

I am trying to install Office 2003 on Windows Vista. It wants to uninstall Office 97. When it tries, nothing happens. I tried to uninstall office 97 thru the Add/Remove programs and it give me an error: unable to open file d:\~MSSETUP>T\~msstfof.t\rnscln97.opc for reading. Make sure file exists and has correct format. Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Barb

 

I was afraid of that. I didn't put it on here:cry, but I am responsible to get it off. Any other thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Was Vista installed on this machine from clean install or as an upgrade from XP? If an upgrade, was Office 97 on the system under Win XP? In other words, do you how Office 97 got installed in Vista in the first place? Do you have the Office 97 CD?

 

This is a new computer so Vista was originally on it. I assume that they just installed because they have been using it for awhile. They just decided that they wanted to upgrade to Office 2003. I do have a Office 97 cd. The Add/Remove asks for the cd when it trys to remove it and I get the above error. I have even tried to reinstall so that I can uninstall, but no go. Once again:cry.

 

Since tihs is a new computer, I'll assume not a great many user files have been accumulated yet. If so, how about just backing up all user files to CD/DVD, flash drive, etc., and restoring the system to it's original configuration. You have a Recovery partition, right? And, by the way, you should create, i.e. burn, a recovery DVD from that Recovery partition.