"Robert W." Robert wrote in message
...

It is all very well to say uninstall the earlier version of outlook, but
what if you no longer have the CD ROM and it is Outlook 2000. I have
wasted
countless hours trying to get rid of Outlook 2000 in order to install
Outlook
2007. Without success I might add.

You shouldn't need the CD to uninstall Outlook 2000. You can also delete
the program's folder and edit the registry to remove references to it,
although that's not trivial. There's also an Office removal tool at
Microsoft's download site. See this:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010548951033.aspx?pid=CH010485191033
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ork2003/HA011401771033.aspx?pid=CH011496861033

Have I seen correctly that the retail version will overwrite the older
versions for you?

I have done it on occasion, but it seems to fail more than it succeeds.

Why on earth can you not have two revs of outlook on the same machine? MS
makes life oh so difficult.

Because of version-specific DLLs that are placed in the %WInDir%\System32
folder, for one thing. Not all of Outlook's files are contained in %Program
Files%\Microsoft Office
--
Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]