Microsoft Office 2010 Professional encountered an error during setup

A friend of mine has complained that he was unable to reinstall Office 2010 Professional on his laptop. The reason for his decision to reinstall Office 2010 was that latest updates for Office 2010 were failing to install on his Windows 8.1. The installer was failing to install the updates with generic code 1603. He has successfully uninstalled Office 2010 using Fix it from following location: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/how-to-uninstall-or-remove-microsoft-office-2010-suites-HA104027750.aspx

Running the setup from Office 2010 installation CD, the installer was not detecting the old installation of Office 2010, and was trying to install new Office 2010 suite, but was failing with following error "Microsoft Office 2010 Professional encountered an error during setup" :

 

 

The error message is generic and not so descriptive, but fortunately Microsoft has published the following KB927153 article. Following the instruction from article, has successfully solved the problem. The new installation of Office 2010 has completed successfully, and all office 2010 related updates were successfully installed.

 

KB954430 repeatedly reinstalls

A colleague of mine was complaining that he had to install same update every day on his workstation. Every time he clicked to install the update, the same update was offered for installing again and again. The "problematic" update was KB954430 Security Update for Microsoft XML Core Services 4.0 Service Pack 2. Microsoft has published an article for resolving this kind on behavior in following KB 941729.
By following the instructions which are consisted of renaming the msxml4.dll and installing the latest MSXML security update, the annoying behavior of reinstalling the same update KB954430 again and again, has been successfully resolved.
 

Machine domain group policy failed to apply

In this case, domain joined workstation with Windows 7 operating system was failing to register itself on new WSUS server. Settings for the new WSUS server were entered into domain GPO. I tried to refresh the settings with gpupdate /force. But, the command was failing to apply computer settings from domain GPO, with following error message:

Computer policy could not be updated successfully. The following errors were encountered: The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows could not apply the registry-based policy settings for the Group Policy object LocalGPO. Group Policy settings will not be resolved until this event is resolved. View the event details for more information on the file name and path that caused the failure.

The output from Gpresult /h gpresult.html was showing failed status for Registry in component status:

 

Error event was logged into System event log with ID 1096 and same description:

The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows could not apply the registry-based policy settings for the Group Policy object LocalGPO. Group Policy settings will not be resolved until this event is resolved. View the event details for more information on the file name and path that caused the failure.

So, all errors were pointing for local policy corruption.
Navigating to c:\windows\system32\GroupPolicy\Machine folder and renaming the registry.pol file into registry-pol.bakup (for example), and running the gpupdate /force again, has resulted the command to successfully complete and apply the computer and user policy settings. The workstation has received new settings for the WSUS server and successfully registered itself on this new WSUS server.

I was using the same method for resolution in my article The processing of Group Policy failed. Event ID 1096, and the reason for not applying the domain GPOs was again the local policy corruption.
 

High CPU Usage from System Interrupts Process

In this case, a colleague of mine was complaining that her workstation was running very slow even tough the workstation was memory upgraded. Since the term "running slow" is very relative, I needed info about the hardware and OS. The operating system was Windows 8.1 Enterprise x64, and hardware was HP ProDesk 600 G1.
The reason for this "running slow" behavior was the CPU usage of system interrupts process. 20-30% of the CPU usage was dedicated to this process all the time. From my experience the reason for this kind of behavior is hardware or driver related. The OS was fully patched with latest updates. So, I've started updating the drivers and BIOS. After updating the drivers and BIOS to the latest HP official versions the behavior was still the same, system interrupts process was holding 20-30% of the CPU. There were no pending restarts. And, the CPU usage behavior was the same on every restart. This behavior of high CPU usage from System Interrupts process has stopped, when I have shut down and power on the workstation. It's very strange, but I have successfully succeeded to reproduce this behavior on this HP model PC. And, this is the scenario when this high CPU usage of system interrupts process will happen for this PC model:

Whenever there is memory size change, BIOS will "alert 164 memory size error " press F1 to continue, the OS will boot and system interrupts process will run high CPU usage. This behaviour will continue, even if the OS is restarted several times. But, if you shut down, and power on the workstation, the CPU usage will be back to normal !

I'll call this a bug, so in case you're doing memory upgrade on this PC model, do not forget to power off and power on the PC after successful memory upgrading.

 

How to move Azure VM to different Cloud Service

In this case I wanted to move Azure VM from one cloud service to another cloud service in same Azure Subscription. Using Microsoft Azure Web Portal this task can be achieved in following three steps:

• Note the disk(s) that were attached on Azure VM, and other configuration settings like VM size, virtual network, endpoints and so on.
• Delete the Azure VM with option to keep the attached disks
• Create new VM from Gallery, and on first Wizard page (Chose an Image) select MY DISKS option, and select the disk noted in first step. Complete the wizard with assigning the VM to the new Cloud Service.

In my case the VM was having couple of additional data disk drives, and I was unable to attached them using Azure Web Portal Create New Virtual Machine from Gallery Wizard. But, this can be easily achieved using Powershell. The script is very easy to read, and is consisted of:

• Setting the currentStorageAccount for the Azure Subscription
• Setting basic variables for the VM, like Name, disks, virtual network, subnet and cloud service
• Creating new configuration for the VM
• And, finally creating the new VM

Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName 'Name of the subscription' -CurrentStorageAccount 'teststorageaccount'

$vmName='test'
$disk0Name = 'test-os-disk0'
$disk1Name = 'test-data-disk-1'
$disk2Name = 'test-data-disk-2'
$vNetName = 'test-VirtualNetwork'
$subNet = 'Sub-1'
$cloudSvcName = 'test-Cloud-Service2'

$vm1 = New-AzureVMConfig -DiskName $disk0Name -InstanceSize Medium -Name $vmName -Label $vmName |
Add-AzureDataDisk -DiskName $disk1Name -Import -LUN 0 |
Add-AzureDataDisk -DiskName $disk2Name -Import -LUN 1 |
Set-AzureSubnet $subNet |
Add-AzureEndpoint -LocalPort 3389 -Name 'RDP' -Protocol tcp -PublicPort 3390 |
Add-AzureEndpoint -LocalPort 5986 -Name 'WinRmHTTPs' -Protocol tcp -PublicPort 5987 |
Add-AzureEndpoint -LocalPort 80 -Name 'http' -Protocol tcp -PublicPort 80 |
Add-AzureEndpoint -LocalPort 443 -Name 'https' -Protocol tcp -PublicPort 443

New-AzureVM -ServiceName $cloudSvcName -VMs $vm1 -VNetName $vNetName

In bold are the two additional data disk, that will be attached during creation of the VM in the new cloud service.