Here’s the situation: drive letters change. I made the mistake of making a Windows XP Pro SP2 installation where a USB flash drive just happened to be in the unit. The system assigned the flash drive as “C,” the CDROM as “D” and the System Drive as “E.”  The system worked fine, but it was so confusing that it was almost unusable. To resolve this, I reinstalled Windows.  all seemed OK, but Office 2003 would not install because of the 1327 Invalid drive error.

I checked all the shell data settings and none of those seemed to affect the situation, but I suppose that it’s best to double check these values:

1. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
2. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
3. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
4. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
5. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

What really solves this problem, however, has eluded many.  Microsoft support notes on this are useless. The general “techhie” consensus is that the drive letters should all be restored to their original undesireable sequence (Sorry, that doesn’t fly with me).

Unlike the hordes of pseudo techs that try to act cool, but they can’t fix a problem if their pathetic geek-wanna-be life depended on it.

Navigate to this registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Delivery\

Change the LocalCacheDrive for each entry in this key.  Office 2003 will now install.