Hi, is there a way to install the retail (msi) version of office 2016 and activate it so that I can get my updates through Windows Update? All the instructions I've found so far seem to lead to a click-to-run installation which I am hoping to avoid.
@JBentham You probably mean VL, which is MSI based. Read the sticky: https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/65644/
I installed windows 1511 back when it was the latest version from an iso generated using Microsoft's own Media Creation Tool. Since then I have used Windows Update to update windows versions.
Hi, was the Windows info useful? Any idea what could be causing the Office activation issue and possible fix?
@JBentham Have you ever installed the retail variant (AKA C2R) and/or any older revision of Office (e.g. 2013) on this instance of Windows? Sounds like the residues are interfering.
Yes, I had C2R at the time of my original post at the top. I uninstalled it from Windows' "Uninstall or change a program". There was a page I think on Tenforums that suggested this was sufficient when switching to MSI, but I'm guessing now from your post that it possibly wasn't. Is there an easy way to detect if there is any residue, and if so to remove it without uninstalling MSI again? EDIT: C2R of Office 2016, I mean (not an earlier version). Both the C2R and MSI were x64 versions.
Many thanks, I'll get onto this now. It might be a while before I post back as the updates take a while to install and also the issue doesn't always manifest straightaway.
Is there a similar tool for uninstalling Visio and Project as this tool seems to leave residual bits of both behind?
Hi I uninstalled office again using the uninstaller built into Microsoft Toolkit and then also ran 3 of the scrub vbs's - OffScrub_O15msi (which turned out to be for office 2013 which I haven't ever installed on this machine), OffScrub_O16msi and finally OffScrubC2R. I feel confident that at that point there were no traces of Office left on my system. I reinstalled from the msi iso again, installed all the updates and again after a while I am experiencing the same issue. Unfortunately the issue is hard to reproduce predictably, when I try to start the sppsvc service manually sometimes it moves to the "running state" after about 3 seconds and other times it times out after 30. More often than not, if it has run recently (eg I opened up Word or manually started the service), when I try it again it runs ok. At the times when it fails there is a lot of disk activity, and using windows' Resource Monitor I see that sppsvc.exe is spending most of its time looking at .cat files in the folder C:\Windows\servicing\Packages, mainly (though not limited to) ones of the format Package_xxxx_for_KBxxxxxx~...cat. I considered the possibility that it is just a service start timeout issue, so I tried setting the ServicesPipeTimeout key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control to 120000 (ie the timeout to 2 mins) but this did not have any effect on the 30 second timeout after restarting my PC. Also I don't remember having this issue when I had C2R installed (although there is always a slight chance that I simply didn't notice it). Does anyone have any other ideas for a fix, eg why is the service timing out studying C:\Windows\servicing\Packages, can this be avoided, and if not is there a working way to increase the timeout? I can't help feeling that spending so long looking at the cat files is not normal behavior for the service.
Have you ever used any "modding" tool like msgtoolkit or ntlite etc to remove some components from your win 10 install?Also have you tried rebooting your system after uninstalling & reinstalling office/updates.