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When I opened up my laptop this morning (8/16/14) there was a pop-up on the screen telling me there was an update available for Microsoft Word Starter 2010 and asking me if I wanted to download it. It did not look like the typical Windows or Office update notification. I closed the pop-up and opened Windows update and ran it. There were some updates available, but none that said they were for Word Starter. IS there a new Update for Word Starter or is this someone trying to get me to download a virus?
***Office Product moved to Office 2010 by the Moderator.***
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Microsoft has posted a Knowledge Base article describing and explaining this popup and providing a solution. Find it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3016799.
Hi everyone,
We heard back from the product group. The dialog is expected for a legitimate Office 2010 starter update. It appears for click to run scenarios where the path is missing a piece of information between the build that the user is running on and the latest available build.
The august update that was pulled is a Windows update, not an Office update.
Thanks!
DK - MSFT support
"We heard back from the product group. The dialog is expected for a legitimate Office 2010 starter update."
That is a darned-poor response from the product group. Let's consider a KEY fact - This all started within the past few days, possibly a week as people on these forums are reporting they have been running Office 2010 for years without ever seeing this message until now, and its occurring all over the world. How then, can the product group reply by effectively saying this is normal.
IT IS NOT NORMAL AND MICROSOFT DID SOMETHING TO TRIGGER THE OUTBREAK OF THIS SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE.
It doesn't matter that it's legit, its a sudden change in how updates are typically handled and it is terribly unclear to probably thousands, perhaps millions of users who are now having to stop what they're doing to deal with this shenanigan.
I am an IT professional supporting a number of small business clients and this morning I started taking calls about this suddenly appearing over the past couple of days. I fired up my own laptop this morning and was also greeted with the message. I'm going to offer up a new twist here - I am very certain that the machines I'm dealing with including my own, did not have Office Starter installed - myself and my customers all use one of the paid editions
I could be wrong, and even if I am, the only reason why we are witnessing what we are is because Microsoft made a change somewhere - my laptop has no Office or Windows updates installed since 7/15/2014, but there have been updates today, on the 14th of August and on the 12th, to Security Essentials. If the issue was not caused by one of these SE updates then Microsoft messed up something in their Click to Run system.
Sure would be nice for Microsoft to officially recognize, explain, and apologize.
Schyler Jones
Hillsboro, NH
This is the same exact pop up I have been seeing. Very unlike Microsoft.
I just started getting this same popup in the past few days... it looks very fake to me so I just keep X ing the box closed. Would be nice to find out how to make it stop appearing, though.
It appears there are two options.
Install the update
Uninstall Office Starter
If one of the most well-known of the Word MVPs (Suzanne) says it is legit then that is enough for me.
EDIT TO ADD: Actually there is a third option - run Office Starter whilst disconnected from the 'net. The push update technology can't work unless connected.
I assume MSoft will eventually add it to an upcoming scheduled Windows update if its official.
They haven't in the past for updates of Office Starter. The Click-to-run technology used means they can do the update very quickly when you go online.