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John, We actually have this installed at the business college Jim and I worked on creating an administrative install point in the past. When I patched the install point all the workstations that needed the files said to insert the media. To fix this I created a batch job on that install point based on Microsoft's suggestion that runs this command: msiexec /i \\server\share\data1.msi REINSTALL=All REINSTALLMODE=vomus When you run that command it says "preparing to install Microsoft Office SR1a" but actually it patches the workstation to use the new files, and is now SP3 We've been successful having our users run this "fixo2k.bat" that executes that command when it asks for the media. As I think about it, it might be something to put in the login script. Have it check for a file, if that file exists skip the command, otherwise Execute the statement, and the workstation will be patched. On slower machines it appears to "prepare" for about 15 minutes. Some users might not want to wait that long. Hope that helps. Tim -----Original Message----- From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Valenti Sent: Friday, March 19, 2004 10:13 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [MSUNAG] Patched up Office 2000 install point Office 2000 has a feature they call "install point". Basically it copies all the files to a network drive and adds the license code #. You can then install a workstation from the install point. If the workstation needs more files in the future, theoretically it will look back at the install point. Or if the files in the install point are patched (SR1a, SP3, ....) the workstation can be tweaked to pull the patched files from the install point. That's the way it should work, but my install point is stuck somewhere between SR1a and SP3. SR1a seemed to load OK. It took several hours, but SP3 said it loaded successfully. I did a client install at that point, and OfficeUpdates says that the client doesn't have SP3. If I try to re-patch with SP3, it says it is already installed. Most of my clients were installed from the network. Once you do that, you can't load SP3 directly on the client. And now if the clients want to add a new file, they say the install point is the wrong version. Half the time, this also messes up the office apps, so none of them will run (an infinite loop of trying to add files, wrong version, ...). Office needs to be manually removed from the system - Microsoft even has a utility for this: eraser2k. :-) The above events transpired over the last year. A new, very bright, student started working for me recently. I asked him to create a patched up install point. He ran into the same problem. My question: has anybody got this to work? Or maybe: if I gave the evil empire $2000 for Office 2003 licenses would I be happier? thanks for whatever advice -John