I am receiving an error when attempting to install
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 which I downloaded from the TechNet site. At the end of the installation process I receive the following message:
"Error 25004. The product key you entered cannot be used on this machine. This is most likely due to previous Office 2013 trials being installed. (System error:
-1073422314)"
I have never installed a trial or Beta of any Office product on this machine. However, I have installed Office 2007 Ultimate and Office 2010 Professional Plus. All of these are 32bit versions downloaded from TechNet site. In addition,
prior to this error I had attempted unsuccessfully to install the 64bit version of Office 2013 as well as standalone versions of Visio Professional 2013 x64 and Project professional 2013 x64. All three of these installations failed due to previous
installation of 32bit Office software, so I have downloaded the 32 bit versions but not yet tried to install, other than Office 2013.
I used the Custom upgrade option during the attempted install of Office 2013, specifying "keep all prior versions".
Note that all the above was done on a new machine. The specific purpose was to test co-existence of multiple versions of OFFICE (2007, 2010, 2013) to facilitate user training and migration.
I have tried uninstalling via Control Panel, and performed some of the steps for manual removal, however did not do all of them since 1) They are quite lengthy and 2) Some of them seem to involve removing ALL prior versions of Office, which I do not want
to do; the earlier versions are working properly and I do not want to have to uninstall them. Just want to uninstall and reinstall Office 2013. Also tried running O15CTRREMOVE.diagcab which indicated that it could not find a problem,
but did not seem to remove anything.
I have read about ten recommended TechNet articles, which recommend everything from running a FIXIt tool, uninstalling all OFFICE software, and reformatting the whole machine. Most of these involve System error -1073418209 rather than -1073422314 (which
is the code that I am getting). Other than that the problem sounds the same. This seems to be a problem with key management and copy protection in these products, dating back to 2010. Dozens of IT professionals have tried the solutions
and vented their frustration since other than the full format, the other solutions work only sporadically, if at all. Some of these people had been working with trial or beta software, but many who encountered this problem had not. As
noted above, none of my software was a trail version. I do not want to uninstall all the OFFICE versions, particularly if it as likely as not will not resolve the issue. (I am also getting paranoid to the extent of fearing that
after uninstalling everything I might not be able to reinstall any version). I think what we need here is a definitive fix from Microsoft, though I am not too hopeful, in view of the lack of response to all the other technicians who have been struggling
with this for at least the past three years.
If anyone is aware of a solution which works consistently, I would appreciate it. Reformatting however is not an option. Detailed instructions for completely uninstalling Office 2013 (ONLY 2013) might be helpful. I would be willing to uninstall
all versions, but only as a last resort, and only if there is some assurance that this will actual solve the problem (for many others it did not seem to do so).
Thanks
PS: Probably doesn't matter, but I am running this on Windows 7 Pro w/SP1, 64 bit edition.