How to Manually Uninstall Office 2010 to Fix Failed or Rollback Installation

Installation of Office 2010 should be an easy and problem-free process for most new users and upgraders. However, some Office 2010 users may encounter installation issue where installation process of Office 2010 halts unexpected before completion, and then stuck forever and indefinitely despite hitting “Cancel” button or rollback the installation.

To make matter worse, it’s impossible to start the installation of Office 2010 again, as install wizard won’t start. There is no entry of Office 2010 in Add and Remove Programs or Programs and Features list too, so end-user cannot uninstall or rollback the failed Office 2010 install attempt. It’s also impossible to install any other version of Office (such as Office 2007) to supersede, overwrite or replace the corrupted Office 2010 installation, the installation wizard cannot continue as another setup was not completed.

It’s also possible that users who messed around with the registry keys and/or license files of Office 2010 will render the Office 2010 installation not working, and any attempt to reinstall with have installer rolls back with error message of “License cannot be verified”.

To fix the Office 2010 installation issue so that Office 2010 can be installed properly, follow these steps as suggested by Microsoft:

1. Download and install the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility.
2. Run Windows Install Clean Up.
3. Highlight Microsoft Office 2010 entry in the list and then click Remove.
   Note: If there is any other old or redundant office entries such as Office 2007 or other Office standalone products such as Visio in the list, do highlight and remove them together.
4. Quit the Windows Install Clean Up when cleanup process finished.
5. Close all applications.
6. Click Start, in the Search box, type regedit and press Enter to run Registry Editor.
7. Expand the registry tree on the left pane and locate the following two registry subkeys:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office
8. Right-click on the registry subkeys and click Delete to delete those keys.
9. Open Windows Explorer, and then browse to the C:\Program Filesand/or C:\Program Files (x86) folder.
10. Perform the following actions:
    If it exists, rename Microsoft Office to “Microsoft Office OLD”
    If it exists, rename OfficeUpdate to “OfficeUpdateOLD”
    If it exists, rename OfficeUpdate14 to “OfficeUpdate14OLD”
11. Click Start, in the Search box, type %Temp% and press Enter.
12. Empty (delete all files and folders inside) the Temp folder.
    Note: If some files can’t be deleted, just skip them.
13. Empty the Recycle Bin.
14. Restart your computer. Try to install Office 2010 again.