I had a remote user, working behind a vpn connection to the office log onto the pc for the first time (which was a hard job in itself – I had to use the dial up networking login to authenticate to the domain and cache credentials to the workstation). This user was having problems running outlook with the software prompting him to provide the location for the office source files with the error message “Error 1706. Setup cannot find the required files. Check your connection to the network, or CD-ROM drive. For other potential solutions to this problem, see C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\1033\Setup.hlp”
Entering the network installation location did not work. This issue is documented in KB Article 297834 which didn’t help what so ever, the setup /fvm took forever to run but didn’t work.
However, if I logged on as the administrator user outlook would run successfully. So I added the user to the administrators group and I still got the same error message.
Looking in the eventlog I got the generic error 1004, but I did get the message “Detection of product ‘{90110409-6000-11D3-8CFE-0150048383C9}’, feature ‘OutlookUserData’, component ‘{8ADD2C9C-C8B7-11D1-9C67-0000F81F1B38}’ failed. The resource ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Office\ 11.0\ Outlook\ UserData’ does not exist.
Copying the registry entries for the admin user for the Office\11.0 tree didn’t work either.
A search on google for 11.0\Outlook\UserData came up with the article kb0106250 on rangersuite. I modified the text file to only include the version 11 entries, ran it and outlook ran through the first time wizard and the user (and I) was very happy.
For completeness sake, the registry entries to fix this problem are in the extended entry.