Written By:
Date Posted: February 11, 2002

Step 4

Since the release of Service Pack 1, there has been a new update called the "". I'm assuming you know that since this was released after SP1, the patch should be integrated after you integrate SP1 into the Office XP files. You'll have to the update and save it to your hard drive.

Extracting the MSP file differs from the administrator update of SP1. All subsequent patches released by Microsoft have to be done via command lines and switches. It really isn't hard, simply type the name of the patch, with the "/?" switch to see your options if you want to know what they are, but for this patch, the switches are as follows...

Therefore, the proper command in your "Run" menu should be:

x:\oxpauiu.exe /t:x:\offup2 /c

Wwhere "x:\oxpauiu.exe" represents the location and the name of the file you want to decompress. As usual, "x" is whatever drive letter you use is, and the .exe name will change depending on the patch. the "/t:x:\offup2" directs the files to go into a temporary folder, which is made before or during the execution of this command. The "/t:" is what actually says "go here" and "here" is the "x:\offup2". I used "offup2" as my working directory, but you can call it whatever you want. Finally, the "/c" tells the extracted files to only be copied to that particular folder.

For this patch to be integrated with your Office XP Service Pack 1 install, run the command as follows:

msiexec /p x:\offup2\MSCTF.msp /a x:\office\proplus.msi shortfilenames=true /qb

For some strange reason, this took a long time to do, but I checked the log files, and it worked...

=== Logging stopped: 2/1/2002 13:53:17 ===
MSI (s) (38:94): Product: Microsoft Office XP Professional with FrontPage -- Installation operation completed successfully.

It took a few tries for me to figure it out, but as far as I know, the one constant in the above command is the target location "x:\%name%\proplus.msi". I was looking everywhere for the MSCTF.MSI file, but it doesn't exist.

Final Words

The whole point of this exercise was to create a CD with Office XP with Service Pack 1. Should there be a Service Pack 2 (likely), this guide should apply to it as well, though I'll be sure to double check. I know some may be thinking that this is a lot of work, but think of it in the long run. You'll now have a backup of your original CD, since I hear a lot of dubious stories like "I lost my originals!!", as well as a backup of your CD key. No longer will you need to apply Service Pack 1 whenever you reinstall, and given the number of horror stories I hear about people not being able to apply SP1, this is a way to get around it.

I suppose it wouldn't be right to leave it at that, so I ran the installation and have a few things to point out...

1) You will no longer need to enter in the CD key if you ever need to reinstall, but...

2) You will still need to activate (or reactivate) the product.

I happened to be performing the steps outlined here as I wrote the article. Most of the above information is located on Microsoft's site, though applying post-SP1 patches took me a while to figure out. For those of you who may not know all the steps needed to do this combined service pack CD, I hope you'll find this guide useful. Perhaps when the Windows XP service pack is released, I'll post a companion guide to this one.

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