I found a lot of information on the Internet about how to fix the PROBLEM when you try to run Access or Publisher and get the ERROR message about the "required registry information is MISSING...". Unfortunately none of it worked. However, it got me on the right track to find and fix the problem myself.
On my computer Excel and Word both worked fine, but Access and Publisher would quit soon after I started trying to do something in them, but first it gave me that error message about the registry. I looked in the Help menu - "About This Program" section where it SHOWS the registration code. Word and Excel were the same But Access and Publisher had a different code - although theirs were identical. I wrote down the codes from Word and from Access then started the "REGEDT32" program. I did a FIND of the code from Access. When it found it I selected rename from the edit menu and added the word Old to change Product-Key to OldProduct-Key and then from the edit menu I selected add a new key and added Product-Key (make sure to use the same name as they have as I am writing this from memory and may not be 100% on the key name - but you will know it when you see it, and put in the key code from Word. Then just exit the Registry. After I did that everything worked GREAT. Thanks for the tip. I'm sure other users who are searching for how to resolve this issue will find this useful.