In past versions of open office and libreoffice, I was able to pick and choose which components of the office suite got installed.
However, with 4.2.1, even though I chose the custom install, I was not presented with a screen to select/deselect components like base and math from installing. How can I remove these components?
I’m running Windows 7 64-bit.
No you can’t remove a single component anymore.
The reason is, that libreoffice needs all components and the saving of hard disk space is minimal if you remove them.
On the libreoffice site you can read:
“The option to select which Modules to install has been removed from the Windows Custom install dialog (Andras Timar). The option made little sense (all the modules are included in the program: it was just the Start Menu icons/shortcuts that were suppressed) and was a source of bugs”
Source: LibreOffice 4.2 Changes · Installer (win only)
I hope I could answer your question.
I don’t care about disk space. The reason I was not installing those components was to prevent users from messing around with them, since it was just something extra that they didn’t need.
While I don’t like the change, I appreciate the answer.
I think simply remove these icons from the start menue should solve this. 
This is because you can paste special a draw document in writer or a calc document in draw or a math formula in an another component. It is one program. So it makes no sense to remove one component, because you can paste the documents in all the other components of LO.
It’s just one icon now. The shortcuts for each component are listed on the libreoffice startup screen.
I am little bit sceptical that only shortcuts where removed - why would that produce “source of bugs”? For example on my computer running LibreOffice 4.1.5 I didn’t install Base and in Writer when I click Tools | Bibliography Database then Writer crashes with C++ Run time error, because some component from Base is missing. So I just can’t believe that “just” Start menu shortcuts were removed.
To clarify: what was removed was not only start menu shortcuts, but also small launcher exe files (like sdraw.exe, less than 100 KB each) in program installation directory. Their only function is to start main soffice process with relevant command line arguments; but there is a code in the LibreOffice that checks for the presence of these stubs before doing some things; and missing the EXEs, it behaves differently (hence the bugs).