In my entire memory, there is no more pesky or nightmarish an un-install process as with the MS Office Activation Assistant.

For the uninitiated among you, the Office Activation Assistant (OAA) is a tool that pc and laptop manufacturers preinstall on your computer at the factory. Here’s a blurb from the Microsoft website:

The Microsoft Office Activation Assistant is a tool that allows customers who have the 2007 Microsoft Office system preinstalled on a new PC to:

Buy a product key; or

Get a key to activate a 60-day trial version of Office Professional 2007.

Now I’m all for helpful tools to make things simpler, but this is not one of them. This may very be the worst tool ever created. This functionality could easily have been a plugin built in to the MS Office suite itself, and in the case of my mom’s laptop which I worked on all day yesterday, it proved once again to be the bane of my existence.

In a previous post, I sent away my mom’s laptop to HP with various hardware-related problems. Yesterday I got it back, and to HP’s credit, it worked. I’m very satisfied that they got it working and did it free as an extended warranty due to a manufacturing error. However, I decided to start her off again with a clean slate, so I ran the recovery partition and reset everything to factory defaults.

I knew somewhat what was coming – I’d dealt with it before many times, but it never gets any less frustrating. In the same post I mentioned earlier, I noted the “crapware” installed by many manufacturers. HP is one of the worst offenders in this regard, along with a “Factory Default” image that is flawed.

What it’s supposed to do is work alongside a preinstalled Office 2007. The laptop in question had Office 2007 Home and Student Edition. What’s supposed to happen is you open OAA and it detects the version installed and automatically grants you a trial or (once you buy one) a retail license. Problem is, this absolutely untouched Pavilion dv2310ca image is broken: OAA doesn’t recognize Office install, and doesn’t state what it’s looking for. What’s worse, you can’t uninstall OAA until you’ve used it to activate Office.

I discovered there were two viable solutions, but neither one are ideal.

A good Samaritan named “richi” over at techarena had some tips that I remember being more useful last time, but this time didn’t work well for me, but that’s not to say it won’t work for someone.

1.
Use "Regedit" to nagivate to
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{65DA2EC9-0642-47E9-AAE2-B5267AA14D75}
or search HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall for "Activation Assitant".
To use Regedit, use Windows-Start-> Run and type in "Regedit"
HKLM is an abbreviation to HiveKeyLocalMachine, which appears as "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" within the registry editor.
2.
Change Values for Keys "NoRepair", "NoModify", "NoRemove" from "1" to "0"
as there is no Key "UninstallString", only a value vor "InstallSource"

I tried this and when I attempted to uninstall, it said I needed to have MS Office installed and activated first. It offends me that someone would be held hostage by a stupid tool to buy a program that a consumer my not want. That being said, I do want Office 2007, but not while held at gunpoint. So I obviously had to uninstall Office 2007 since it wasn’t recognized by OAA. Then I installed my personal retail Office 2007 copy, and tried that. Keep in mind the install of Office is a rather time consuming process. Once it was installed, I ran OAA again. This time it seemed to recognize the Office install since it automatically opened up Word for me, but then it just sat there and did nothing.

The techarena link above also indicates that another way to remove OAA is to download a trial version of home and student (a ~300 MB file), use OAA to get a trial key, apply the key, and then uninstall the Assistant followed by the unwanted Office install, so that I can reinstall the version of Office I do want. This ended up being the solution that worked, and I knew it would, but I wanted to do everything in my power to find a simpler solution.

I failed.

And yes it is Vista, but ultimately it not Microsoft’s fault. Yes they wrote a stupid tool. But who installed it? The manufacturer (in this case HP). Who created a faulty factory image? The manufacturer. If they’d just set up the image properly and tested it, the tool might have worked properly out of the box.

The sad thing is with all the stigma attached to Vista (which I completely believe to be a great operating system flawed only by Apple-fuelled propaganda), people will blame the OS for the problems. Vista’s acceptance has greatly been hindered by manufacturers crippling their own systems with bloated crap preinstalled on it. Case in point I just spent all day yesterday uninstalling tools, such as ones telling me to buy AOL or Verizon – one of which I’m amazed people still use, and the other not even available in Canada (keep in mind this laptop was specifically designed for Canada hence the “ca” part of dv2310ca).

I entreat all manufacturers to stop loading your systems with junk. Nobody wants it. And Microsoft should discourage crapware that makes its OS look bad.