‘Cannot display template; Installer error 1606 (20

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Hi folks,

I have a weird problem with PowerPoint. It opens correctly and can display an existing presentation just fine, but if I try to change the presentation slides template by clicking Format | Slide Design, I get the error message:
“Microsoft Office PowerPoint can’t display the template used in this document. Microsoft Office PowerPoint cannot install the necessary files due to Windows installer error 1606. Feature ID not registered.”
Weirdly, this is displayed a consistent 66 times (I can be very persistent sometimes) and then it goes ahead and displays the various design template choices anyway (there are 44) and allows me to apply any of them.

I’ve tried de-installing both Office and the Windows Installer, running Registry Mechanic, re-installing Installer and then Office (and then SP2), but to no effect at all. Running Windows XP Pro SP2, Office SBE 2003 SP2, Norton AV, Zone Alarm, Counterspy, etc.

I had a very similar problem with Word (the same message popped up four times in a row whenever I opened Word, which then did display a blank document created with the normal.dot template it said it couldn’t display), and it turned out to be a corrupted normal.dot template. Renaming the existing one and letting Word build a new one cured that; is there a similar exercise that would help here?

Any ideas?

Regard

Jon Inge

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It sounds as though you have an invalid directory path in one of the registry entries for the template PowerPoint is using. Finding and fixing that is likely an exercise in finding the needle in the haystack, so replacing your current template blank.pot might be the first step to try. It’s akin to replacing the normal.dot in Word.

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Hi Wendell,

Thanks for the prompt response. I don’t seem to have a blank.pot file on my drive (searched all of C: including sub-folders, hidden and system files) but I think you’re on to something; when I repeated the search but looking for all *.pot files, it found 66 of them, which number is probably not a coincidence. Eleven are Photo Album Templates, ten are the generic 1033 business templates that come with Office, 44 are the PowerPoint Presentation Designs templates, and one is PWRPNT11.POT in the Windows/ShellNew directory. Does this offer any further clues?

Best regards

Jon

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Hi Wendell,

A somewhat belated folow-up, I’m afraid, but I’ve just done another search for the “blank.pot” file you suggest I delete, and Search doesn’t find one. It DOES find one called PWRPNT11.POT in c:/Windows/Shellnew; is this the equivalent? If I delete this, will PowerPoint build a new one, or will that cause problems?

Best regards

Jon

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PWRPNT11.POT in C:WindowsShellnew is only used when you right-click an empty part in Windows Explorer or on the desktop and select New | Microsodft PowerPoint Presentation, it is not used from within PowerPoint itself.

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