I was having major problems with Office updates and Toast updates. My problem with the updater installers was different than the typical one, although I had seen frequent mention of it in online forums. You'd start the installer (Entourage/Hotmail and Network Security and Toast Titanium) and it would hang on "Gathering Information" until you force quit it.
The problem is that the VISE installer is looking for the program in the Applications folder on the same partition as the System folder. If it's not there, it can't find it and hangs, which happens with the Toast Titanium updater from VISE as well. This is a major problem as many people are installing OSX on its own partition, away from everything else, as a reinstall requires reformatting the system partition.
A quick fix is to uninstall Office, then reinstall it under Applications on the System partition. Updates like a dream. Then you can move it anywhere. But, I'm not sure what I'll do with the next update. It's clearly a problem the VISE folks need to work on.
[Editor's note: I can't vouch for this as I don't have Toast and Office v.X is installed in the Applications folder. Can anyone else verify the problem?]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020222092948120