I recently ran across a very frustrating problem with Office 15 (Office 365/ Office 2013). After uninstalling office on a Windows 7 computer, I could not reinstall it. The error I received was ‘Couldn’t Install’. We’re sorry, we had a problem installing your Office programs(s). I could not find any additional errors or issues in the event viewer, or on the filesystem.
Here are things I tried:
1.) Ran MalwareBytes, and Combofix to check for malware.
2.) Disabled AV and Firewall.
2.) Ran the MS Fix It Tool from here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2739501
3.) Manually uninstalled Office using https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manually-uninstall-Office-2013-or-Office-365-1d1110d5-75a4-4154-969e-4260ff29b232?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
4.) Restarted the computer after turning off all non-Microsoft services and startup apps by through ‘msconfig’.
5.) Thinking that my D: drive (that was low on disk space) was causing problems, I resized the partition using EaseUS free.
After all this, I was getting the same error:
The Solution
I looked through the file system and found a couple folders that were office365 related and deleted them. The folders were under the ‘ProgramData’ folder (they are hidden, so you need to unhide them through Windows Explorer). Here are the folders I deleted:
c:\programdata\office*
(anything that started with office was put in the recycle bin).
After deleting these files, the install immediately ran–no need to reboot.
Hopefully that saves you a few hours of frustration, I know I would have liked this info earlier in my troubleshooting!!
