Word's disabled items list

[Alex K. Angelopoulos [MVP]]

Does anyone know of a way to access Word's disabled items list
programmatically, or failing that, does anyone know where it is actually
stored?

While demoing a batch document conversion tool, I had a failure opening a
Word 2000 document due to a bug in Office 2003 (fixed, there's a patch for
it). Unfortunately all 881 documents in the queue following the one that
caused the crash are now disabled and I'm being prompted to click and enable
each one. I can do that of course, but it would be a little better if I
could give potential users a better workaround than this.

 

[Alex K. Angelopoulos [MVP]]

Does anyone know of a way to access Word's disabled items list
programmatically, or failing that, does anyone know where it is actually
stored?

Found it. The registry key is
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\<VERSION>\Word\Resiliency\DisabledItems

The items underneath it (on my system at least) are all REG_BINARY with the
filepath as the value and arbitrary 7-character hexadecimal names.

Looks like the only way to handle this is to enumerate the keys and nuke
them as-needed for particular files.

Out of curiosity, does anyone supporting Word in a large-scale environment
have any opinions on the relative value of the disabled items feature? I can
see reasons for it in general, but Word generally is stable enough with
documents that this fix seems likely to produce more problems than it
solves.