Application with no references to Office requiring Office 12 (2007) in GAC for ClickOnce

Question

I have a situation where I'm trying to deploy an application update via ClickOnce to many users, but on some it's failing with an error saying that they need Office 12.0.0.0 in their GAC.

This happened after I installed Office 2007, so I uninstalled 2007 and reinstalled Office 2003, then re-built/re-published the app. Fixed it for some, but not all.

There are no references to Office in the application, so I'm unsure why it's checking for a dependency.

I checked my GAC, and it still lists office 12 and won't let me remove it - says it's required by Windows Installer

Answer 1

Check here: Project properties - Publish - Prerequisites.

and here: Setup package properties - prerequisites.

Answer 2

I think I've resolved the problem, but I'm not sure how it occurred. There was a reference to office.dll in the Application Files on the publish tab. It was listed as a requried prerequisite, but wasn't listed under the Prerequisites (which is why I didn't accept WakeUpScreaming's answer, although I did sort of find it as a result of his suggestion.

Since there were no references to anything Office in my app, I marked that file Exclude and it now will deploy to my users.

Just thought I'd let everyone know what I found.

Update 4/6/09: After un-installing all possible Office 2007 components, including the PIAs, I still had the problem. Turns out that there was still a Policy in the GAC redirecting Office 11 to Office 12, and they wouldn't un-install. I used GACBrowser to remove the policies and all is well.