Download Office 2007 SP2, don’t use Windows Update
Update 4/30/2009 – Microsoft support helped me fix the problem using an internal script/utility called au_check_v78f.exe to clear out my update database which may have been corrupted. Hopefully, they will make this tool public.
For anyone who has more than one computer running Office 2007 or if you may need to run the update on a future reinstall, I would suggest that you download the Office 2007 SP2 update here rather than use Windows Update. That’s because the file is just shy of 300 MB and it’s a big hassle to have to download the file more than once.
Be aware that the update does require a reboot. Also note that it may take some time for Outlook 2007 to reprocess your email data file the first time you run it after the SP2 update. Then once I’m all done, redo “check for updates” under Windows Update and hopefully it removes Office SP2 from the list of items that need to be downloaded and installed and you will still see a bunch of other smaller Office updates. On my desktop system for some reason, Windows Update insists that I need to download Office 2007 SP2 and install it even though it’s already installed. I didn’t see this problem on my laptop. I’ve reported the issue to Microsoft and hopefully they’ll have a remedy for this because this would be very annoying for IT people.
Of course if you’re an IT shop, you should be using WSUS to distribute the updates centrally. That works infinitely better than pulling updates “from the cloud” because you’re getting the updates from the local area network.
Although SP3 for Office 2003 tended to bomb. I don’t like doing the larger updates from WSUS for this reason. However, I wouldn’t have what little free time I have if not for WSUS. Probably still updating to prevent confickr.
Along with Vista/Server 2008 SP2, I did a clean install (still no integrated Server 2K8 SP2 image yet) and slipstreamed SP2 into Office 2007 which has been made dead easy eith simply extract the files from the 300MB update and placing them in updates folder.
I needed a clean install of the OS anyway as all my drivers and major softwares I used were at least 6months outdated so I did it all at once. Just another routine for me.
I just discovered a similar problem with my dell laptop running Vista which is showing that I previously installed the Office 2007 SP2 successfully through Windows Update, but also has it showing up as an available update. It creates a problem since Vista will not let me uninstall it to check if its really installed or not!