Office 2003 Service Pack 3 - Error 1402: MigrationDLLs Key Error

We have a stand-alone laptop that has bulked at the SP3 update for Office 2003 delivered via Microsoft Update or when the Service Pack was downloaded and an attempt to install was made from the download.

The error was a strange one:

Error 1402. Setup cannot open the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\Migration DLLs. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to access the registry or contact your computer manufacturer's product support for assistance.

The user that was logged on the system at the time of the update had local admin rights.

Opening Regedit and navigating to the requested key produced an access denied message while logged in as the user.

So, we logged off, and logged in again using the built-in Administrator account.

This enabled us to click on the key in Regedit and view its contents:


After right clicking on the key and clicking on Permissions, the "Group or User names:" window was blank.

After clicking the Add button, we added and gave full control to:

• Administrators
• Power Users
• Users

Click OK, Apply, and OK again.

User Permissions

Log off and log on again as the original user and run the update. One should see that the Service Pack installed correctly:


The closest KB article: KB 838687: You receive an error message when you install an Office program or open an Office program or document. The first bullet under Cause was applicable, with a combination of Method 1 and 4 being the correct way to fix it.

Note that WSUS based Office 2003 SP3 updates and stand-alone automatic Microsoft/Windows Updates that fail may be dealing with the same issue.

Also note that the domain admin account may be necessary if the local admin account also gets denied access to the key.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

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