Error opening doc from Documents folder - Windows cannot find the document

[John Hupp]

In Office 2003 on Windows XP x64, everything had been working fine until a
couple weeks ago. Then we started getting a misbehavior in which neither
Word nor Excel would open a file double-clicked from within a Windows
Explorer window. But the file would open fine from within Word or Excel.
We did a System Restore to several weeks ago, and this fixed the Excel
misbehavior, but not Word's. We still get the error message "Windows cannot
find the document."

We tried manually jiggling the file association for doc files via
shift-right-click | Open With | Choose Program | Wordpad (check-marking
"Always use this program...") and then using the same procedure to restore
Word as the doc file opener, but that did not help.

I thought we might get an option to repair Office from Add/Remove Programs
and choosing either Change or Remove. But Change just causes a window to
flash open and close before we can read it. And Remove begins immediately
with "Are you sure you want to remove this program?"

It seems like there should be an easier fix for this than a complete
uninstall/reinstall of Office.

Anyone recognize the problem?

--John Hupp

 

[Terry Farrell]

Try reregistering Word by running winword /r from the Run command line.

 

[John Hupp]

Thanks, Terry, it was a beautiful and simple idea, but it did not work.

Interestingly, when successfully or unsuccessfully trying to open Word or
Excel files from My Documents, we usually notice a window that flashes up
briefly that says "Preparing to install ..."

Have you got anything else in the bag of tricks?

 

[Terry Farrell]

Preparing to install! Try logging in as the Administrator, running one of
the Office apps and see if the same screen pops up?

Terry