For the last 3 patch cycles Ive been having an issue with my clients that have Visio/Project installed additionally to the default office suite losing their default file associations, unable to repair, unable to uninstall office, musr run the MSRA tool to fully remove office/reinstall to get everything working again.

This seems to affect deeper than just Windows file associations as we have some apps that use com object to determine the type of file to give he end user and these all start failing as if can't determine Office is even installed.

Office is deployed via the click to run method with XML's generated for the standard product. We then deploy Visio and/or project to a number of users with a seperate installation xml.

This is the 3rd month in a row that office patches deployed from Desktop Central have broken these installs completely. Machines with just Office installed without Visio/Project installed as well are fine.

Any ideas?