wow..........after reading all of this, I'm going to have to go with rich's answer; something is hosed in the registry after that pirated copy was installed. When you remove something from the appwiz applet, you don't dump all the registry files; a good little app that is handy to have around that DOES do that is revouninstaller. I'd download that, see if it recognizes that pirated version of Office, but other than that, it's going to have to be a reformat or live with it type deal.
I mean,
everything has been tried, but the simple fact that it won't sp2 for office 2k7 means that something is shot in the registry. That's the smoking gun right there. Your computer shop people may have uninstalled it, but I guarantee you all they did was use the add/remove applet, and that won't clean out the registry.
And by the way, you should never, ever use automated registry cleaners except for revouninstaller. I've had to fix so many pc's from registry cleaners mucking stuff up it's not even funny anymore.
You could try to call MS, but the answer, I am certain, lies buried in thousands of entries in the registry; finding them all would be impossible.
As rich stated, it's time to nuke and pave or live with it as is, unfortunately.
I guess one option that hasn't been done is to use
revo to uninstall your current office suite, make sure you choose the heaviest level of uninstall (there's only 4), have it clean out all the registry entries (it will find about 9k of them) and reboot, reinstall office with the license key and go from there. Only problem with that is that your license key may not work (very slim chance, but it's there) and you would then have to call MS regardless.
Sorry I couldn't be of more help.............
v