title: C#: How to know whether certain Office 2003 or 2007 application is installed?
body: <p>I need to know whether Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Project, etc are installed in a Windows Forms .net 2.0 C# application.<br />
  The first attempt was by simply trying to create the application objects and catching any exception, but this is too time consuming.<br/>
  Is there any faster way to detect this? Like checking registry values, or another technique with the COM wrappers?</p>