Htmlmarq.ocx was unable to register itself in the system registry.

This is a known issue and a right pain in the bottom to fix.
Your best course of action is to upgrade all your 97 Db's to 2000 at least.

Saying now may be a good time to rewrite them to XP/2003 or even 2007 compliance.

If you have already installed SP2, then this is one of the reason behind your problem. You can try for disabling the HTML and HTML converter when installing office. There is another way to solve this issue which you can try if you are an advanced user and can edit the registry.

Microsoft Access can't start because there is no license for it on this machine.