MSDE 2000 on top of Office 2002

I have a company PC preloaded with:
- Win-2000 SP4
- Access/Excel 2002 (10.x) SP-2

I need to install MSDE, and I have the Office 2000 CD. The queostion is: would MSDE cause a regression in Access and Excel ?

I understand why MSDE is packaged together with Office. But I hope they do not use too many common resources (e.g. DLLs). Otherwise, isntalling MSDE 200 would throw Access/Excel back to the 2000 level.

Is MSDE really independent of the version of Office running on the same machine ?It should not affect your office installation at all because MSDE has nothing to do with office. All it is, is a data engine like SQL Server so it is like installing SQL Server 7.0 on the machine.