"error in the Microsoft Word previewer"

Happy New Year.  Here we are in 2012 Microsoft and no fix for it's Office 2010 bugs.  The fix for this apparently is to preview word documents through Excel?  Oh come on.  This slows me down tremendously when I'm scanning for a certain letter, etc.  I don't understand why something that worked so well in the 2003 Office doesn't work for 2010.  THis also includes the autotext issue working sporadically.  Hello...is anyone working on these issues, or does it  just not matter?

All I know is that I'm still getting the same intermittent results I've been getting for years. I have three monitors, so I can afford the screen real estate to keep Windows Explorer open all the time. And, that's my work-around. When I need to see previews, I use Windows Explorer. I do not know if this is actually being worked on or if, instead, all resources are going into the next version of Office. If the latter, I sure hope this is on their list of long-broken things they plan to fix.

Yes, the "/a" switch works but I've wasted ages looking at Article 921541 and trying out every possible registry change to find a better solution. Oddly, when I used my "/a" version of Word (which DOES preview documents), then immediately switch to my ordinary non-switch version of Word, it will work ok too ... that is, until I close it down and re-launch when I get back to the same old error report about the previewer. I find it puzzling / shameful that MS have a clear problem but seem stumped. Or are they too busy faffing around with Windows 8 and hoping that will grab everyone's attention?

This isn't a fix nor a work around.  It's a common problem and frankly it appears no one has been able to get MS to provide anything but lip service.  There is a temporary repair, however, by appending Space/a after the final " in the winword.exe" call.