[German]A blog reader contacted me by e-mail a few days ago because he was facing a problem. Various programs cannot be installed on his Windows (in this case the phonostar client and UnigetUI). The installation is aborted with a runtime error and the message that the installation is only valid for products that are installed. I'll take up the problem here in the blog, maybe one or the other reader is affected.
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A reader's observation
Blog reader Frank reported installation issues for products that he are currently installs. He has the problem that he cannot install a few programs under his Windows 10 22H2. Specifically, the reader is unable to install the latest phonostar client and the UnigetUI application. Below is the error dialog of his German Windows.
The installation is aborted with the above error dialog, which reports a runtime error. The value in brackets varies and is an address that triggered the runtime error at runtime. The plain text message "Dieser Vorgang ist nur für Produkte gültig, die zurzeit installiert sind" is, in good Microsoft tradition, not very useful.
The user thinks that the developer of UnigetUI is still researching the problem. The phonostar support team had no idea what was causing the problem. Frank wrote: "Somehow the installer itself seems to require something that is missing in my case." He didn't find anything useful in a search, he wrote.
Other user reports
I searched then the internet and found other reports about that issue. There is a reddit.com thread Windows 10 & Office 2016 "This action is only valid for products that are currently installed", where the same behavior is reported.
And I found an entry in Microsoft Answers forum, where the error dialog box has been shown. But there the user received the error, when he is trying to open Microsoft Excel.
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An attempt to explain this error
In the case reported above from the German blog reader, the runtime error is caused by the (MSI-) installer, which tries to execute dependent procedures through incorrect registry entries, but which refer to a package that is no longer installed. There is a discussion along these lines in this StackOverflow post. If you know which registry entries are misleading the (MSI) installers, you could search for them in the registry and delete them manually.
I don't know if tools like Revo Uninstaller can help and clean up the orphaned registry entries – you have to try it out.
Try to repair Microsoft Office
It appears that in some cases mentioned above, old Office versions that have been incompletely uninstalled are responsible for the above error message. Expired Office trial installations were also listed as a cause. The only solution here is to clean up the registry. The article mentions some registry keys that may need to be deleted.
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\15.0
The 15.0 subkeys may need to be adjusted accordingly if a newer version of Office is used. This measure removes any incompletely uninstalled Office from the registry. Windows must then be restarted.
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