Word 2003 FileBlockOpen registry setting does not work

[David Armstrong]

Hello all,

This is far from a general question but short of paying PSS hundreds of
dollars, I don't have anywhere else to turn to for help. I recently pushed
out Office 2003 SP3 onto the network via WSUS. Now I am running into the
problem where Word 2003 will not open files because a "registry setting"
prevents it. I researched the issue and found KB 922849 that details how to
resolve it. I successfully pushed out a GPO with the FileOpenBlock option
set to Disabled for all of the file types. I verified that the GPO was
successfully applied with gpresult and also ran regedit on the machine to
verify that the registry keys were successfully created.

According the knowledge base, the security update 934181 for Word 2003 is
supposed to allow the FileOpenBlock functionality to be disabled with
registry key entries. According to the WSUS server, computers on my network
with Office 2003 SP3 are categorized as "Not Needed" for that update. If I
try to download the update through Office Updates it does not appear. If I
manually download the update and run it from download.microsoft.com it tells
me that the computer does not need the update because it is already applied.

My suspicion is even though the 934181 update has been superceeded by
another update, neither the original 934181 update or whatever update
superceed it are correctly being installed.

Help!

 

[David Armstrong]

Update...

The correct setting is FileOpenBlock. Sorry about that.

The other thing is that the 934181 update is superceded by Office 2003
Service Pack 3.

The issue still remains the same. For whatever reason Word isn't checking
the registry keys to figure out that it should ignore the "enhanced" security
measures.

 

[David Armstrong]

I hacked together a work around. Disabling all of the options (DWORD value =
0) did not work. What I had to do was set the Block opening files before
version to a really old version. In my case I set it to Word 2.x for Windows.

Hopefully this information will be helpful to others who run into similar
issues.

In summary, it isn't that Word wasn't reading the registry keys, it was...
sort of. The registry keys just weren't acting like one would anticipate
them acting. Setting them to disabled should have let Word open any older
doc types. It didn't.