Word won't start (File Not Found) on web download

[Tomas Vera]

Hello All,

On our company intranet, we have several pages which list Word
documents available for downloading. When the user clicks the link, a
"Open, Save, Cancel" dialog appears.

For most users, they simply select "Open" and the DOC file opens in
Word as expected.

But for one user, the process doesn't work.

When she clicks the "Open" button, she gets a "File Not Found" dialog
and Word hangs on startup.

If she "Saves" the document to her disk, she can open the file as
expected.

In addition, if Word is already open when the visits the web page, the
document opens as expected.

I'm barely a Word user, so I don't have any ideas on how to
troubleshoot this. Anyhelp is appreciated!

-tomas vera

 

[Beth Melton]

You might try un-registering Word and then re-registering it again. Go
to Start/Run and run the following commands:

winword /unregserver
winword /r

Note the space before the forward slash.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[Tomas Vera]

When I run the
'winword /unregserver'
command, Word starts up normally. Is this wha is supposed to happen?

Running the
'winword /r'
command starts the installer and I suspect that the registration
continues as expected.

Still testing the fixes.

Thanks for your suggestions!


-tomas

 

[Beth Melton]

It's the /r switch that is the most important. It will rebuild the
file associations for Word since it's the instructions in the file
association that are used when you open a file outside the
application.

Let us know what you find.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[Tomas Vera]

OK. I ran 'winword.exe /r' with no results.

The links to word docs still launch Word, but the 'file can not be
found' errors still pop up.

My next strategry is to update from Office XP to office 2003, hoping
that this will create the new registry entries needed to launch the
documents.

I'm still puzzled about the behavior of
'winword.exe /unregserver'
since all that happened was that WinWord started up with a blank
document.

Is this the expected behavior?

-tomas

 

[Beth Melton]

The /unregserver switch supposed to unregister the file associations.
Here's a link to a KB article I found for you:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=918957

Based on your description I'm wondering if this no longer works for
some of the more current versions of Word. I tried this after your
post and encountered the same thing, Word started and the file
associations weren't removed. Although I also have Word 2007 installed
so my results may be different.

Note that I added that command simply as a precaution. I've found a
few times that the /r (short for regserver) didn't recreate all of the
file associations. So if they are missing, they would definitely be
recreated when you use the /r switch.

You still might try manually deleting them and use the /r switch to
create them if upgrading to Office 2003 doesn't work.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/