Office apps "not installed for current user"

I thought I'd give Windows 7 another go. But having installed Office 2007, I can't run any of the Office applications; each one reports not being installed "for the current user."

This is a common enough error and I found a suggestion somewhere to replace the ownership and permissions for all the executable files. I did that: I changed the ownership from SYSTEM to my own user account for each executable file, and made sure I was specified to have full access to those files. Still no go. Frustrated, I enabled Take Ownership in the context menu and took ownership of the entire Program Files folder and all its contents. Still no go. I've replaced the shortcuts (as in recreated) but that has not helped either.

I am not excited about the idea of removing Office and reinstalling it again, because I had this exact same issue on my Vista installation and reinstalling did not help. I only have one user account on this system, it is assigned as an admin, and UAC is turned completely off.

Any ideas?

You could try a repair install and see if that works? I've seen someone else get that error (on Vista, but it should be the same) and doing a repair install via the control panel sorted it for them - worth a shot and it's quicker than doing a full reinstall

That's interesting and have not heard anything about it. Let me know what you do to fix it.

It's apparently commonly caused by a patch installed for Office via Microsoft Update. Erasing OLA12.dll or whatever it's called fixed it for me, although I had to reactivate Office. Restarting Office recreates the erased file.