Microsoft Office security updates fail installation

Microsoft has issued several security updates for Office 2003 since Oct. 6, but they won’t install on my 64-bit Windows system. (It’s clearly not my weekend for working with software.)

My big HP workstation (two single-core 2.6GHz Opteron processors, Win XP Pro x64, SP1) just won’t accept the seven “high priority” updates issued for Office 2003 SP2.

I’ve tried automatic background updates, running Microsoft Update in the foreground, and even downloading the patches to install them manually. No dice, and nothing about this in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. Grrr.