Office 2007's Impossibly Slow Install

The day that Office 2007 came out, I logged in to MSDN and downloaded the ISO. A good seven hours later, I was still attempting to install the suite of apps. I run Windows Server 2003 on my laptop and wondered if that was a problem but the system requirements listing said that Office 2007 was compatible with Win2k3. My install, however, would just sit there for hours, locking up my mouse and all my programs. Even my clock would stop for hours at a time. I tried Window XP compatibility on the setup.exe but it didn't help at all.

Last night I needed to install Access for a proof-of-concept I was working on and I didn't want to install Office 2003. I tried an Office 2007 install again and ran into the same problems. I then performed a defrag & Windows Update and that didn't help either. The setup ran quickly up until it began the actual install (after asking questions about the install).

I realized that before the install could do anything, it had to remove Office 2003, as that was one of the options I selected. I canceled out of the installer and double-clicked setup.exe again. This time around, I told it to not remove any Office 2003 components. That worked perfectly and the entire installation process took about five minutes or less. Now, after two months of my initial download, I'm finally up and running Office 2007!