I recently ran into a problem on my machine where my installation of Office 2007 became corrupted. As a result, I was not able to repair or uninstall it from the Add/Remove programs menu. Instead of giving up and going through the major hassle of reinstalling everything, I came across a more elegant (and much faster) solution: The Windows Installer Cleanup Utility.

This utility simply “tricks” your computer into thinking a program is no longer installed on your computer, so you can then go back and reinstall it. In my case, it worked perfectly as after the “reinstall” I didn’t have to activate my copy of Office 2007 again.

Usage is simple enough, just install the program and then run it. You are presented with a list of all programs which were installed using the Windows Installer Service and you just select which ones to delete the installation information for. Once you have done this, you should be able to reinstall the program with no problems.