Over the last few days we have had lots of calls about a certain issue. Word documents aren’t opening anymore on Windows 7 mahcines. The file associations seem to be lost and in the case of Office 2010 Starter it can be a real pain to associate them again, due the virtualised way the Office 2010 Starter (and One Click Office 2010) installs are done.

After the first 2 calls I commented to my colleague that I hadn’t really seen the issue before (yes people change their file associations by mistake) but after 5 calls there was clearly something going on.

It turns out that Microsoft released an update recently which has caused all this. The offending update is:  kb2589275

For full Office install you can try running winword.exe /r which should associate them with Word again. Starter users aren’t so lucky and may need to try a repair of Starter or remove the update.

Good ol’ Microsoft. Keeping Orbits IT in business since 2010!