I thought I had a handle on this, but no such luck. I'm sort of re-opening my last post with additional and more focused information. Windows Update identifies several Office fixes and downloads them. When I attempt to install, I get 0x80070643 error for each fix. I have registered the DLL's as recommended in Per's entry, and following the MS forum recommendation, have set the OSE startup type setting to "manual" using services.msc. I have also tried setting the startup type to "automatic". Still nothing works. Any suggestions (short of installing Linux - maybe that IS the answer :-) ) Thanks David in the Big O

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I finally found a solution for this problem, on the MS Windows support forum. It seems that my non-MS antivirus package, Shield Deluxe 2008 was causing the failure. I disabled SD 2008 during the updates and forced them from the MS website. My approach was to download and install a number of Windows XP fixes, and then follow that up with the MS Office 2003 updates. Both worked fine. I still see no reason for the particular error code, the definition of which turned out to be completely misleading. Anyway, thanks for your help, folks. David in the Big O