For some unknown reason my Windoze machine got the registry all screwed up. Hey, it's Windoze, every Windoze user has this done to them eventually. The effect was that I could not reinstall Micro$oft Office coz it gave a fatal registry error during the de-install. All the Micro$oft knowledge base articles were as useless as each other. Shareware registry cleanup utilities didn't clean it up either. Eventually I found out how to do this. You need a tool called subInAcl. Download it from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e8ba3e56-d8fe-4a91-93cf-ed6985e3927b&displaylang=en
Then create a DOS batch file, let's call it fix-office-perms.cmd, containing the following:
cd /d "%programfiles%\Windows Resource Kits\Tools"
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %SystemDrive% /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %windir%\*.* /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
Start a DOS command window, cd to where you put this script, then run it. Watch it repair the permissions. It takes several minutes to run. Strewth, what a hassle! But at least there is a way out.
The corrupt registry seemed to be triggered by an error that happened during an attempted install of Visio. Towards the end of the install it said:
Could not open key: UNKNOWN\MsoHelp.HtmlHelp\CLSID.
Verify that you have sufficient access to that key,
or contact your support personnel.
