I have office 2003 on one of my client computers.  They have people emailing them .xls attachments to open for their jobs to flow correctly.  Every time they go to open these Excel attachments the windows installer pop up begins to try to run an installation of excel.  This is really annoying and it slows down the production of this client.  

I have tried to save it to the desktop and once again it opens an windows installation process.  They are not trying to install anything.  If someone could shine some light on this subject that would be great. Thanks for the help.

So they're trying to open excel documents and the windows installer is coming up instead. Have you tried simply letting it complete the installation? What happens if it continues, does it eventually open the spreadsheet, do you always stop it from continuing, do you get an error, does it open and then go through this process again the next time they try to open a spreadsheet?

Hopefully I'm missing something but it sounds to me as if the Excel part of Office hasn't yet been installed on those machines, and so the system is simply trying to get that part installed so it can be used to open the spreadsheet.

No Excel has already been installed on the machine I know it was because we installed here at the office and sent her the machine.  I have let it complete all the way through and it errors out, asking for the disk media that holds the rest of the information.  But the only problem with that is you can open excel outside of the email and open up other excel documents that are already on the computer.  It is only happening with attachments that are emailed to this person.  Every time you try to open the spreadsheet document it runs through the same process.

Everywhere that i have looked through searching has told me to run windows installer cleaner but the only thing that does is delete the program so that you have to re-install the program and I am sure that is not what needs to happen seeing that i can open it fine without any problems out side of the email attachments.

Please go to control pane and fix your Office suite to check the result.

Tony Chen
TechNet Community Support