Launching Help in Office 2007 generates Windows Installer Error 1305

Here's an interesting issue that Paul Freitas ran across the other day that you might find interesting.  I hadn't seen this one before but if you're sequencing using one drive letter and your clients use another then chances are you'll hit it eventually.

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Problem: Launching help within a virtualized (sequenced) version of Microsoft Office 2007 returns Windows Installer error 1305.

Cause: This is a known issue with MS Office and any other product built using Visual Studio 2005.  The Visual Studio 2005 build process results in products that hard code the help file path in a binary file.  Because of this, other products built with same version of Visual Studio could be effected.

Resolution: Obviously the best resolution is to be sure that when you sequence your applications you use the same drive letter you standardized on when you rolled out your clients.  If it's too late for that, you can either resequence using the clients drive letter or you can use the subst command to create a Q: drive (or whichever drive the application was sequenced to) redirected to whichever drive your clients use.  For example, if you sequenced Office to the Q drive but your clients use a T drive for their virtual drive you would run a command like this:

SUBST Q: T:\

You would run this command only once and run it prior to launching the affected application.  And of course you have to be sure that the drive your substituting (the Q drive in our example) is not already in use on the client.

To avoid this you should always follow the best practice of sequencing your apps using the same drive letter that your clients use for their virtual drives but if a one time issue pops up you may be able to work around it using the example above.

J.C. Hornbeck | Manageability Knowledge Engineer