Official Word Starter update?

I hope Suzanne is reading this....    She keeps sticking up for Microsoft.   Like I said, if Microsoft made this **** then they need to fix it.   YES Suzanne, FOR FREE....    WE NEED MICROSOFT ON THIS WEBSITE HELPING CLEAN UP THE CLICK TO RUN MESS THAT MICROSOFT MADE....

I am getting the same message box as islander411 ... Unfortunately, last week I clicked OK.  I check for updates several times a day through the Tools menu and shouldn't have fallen for this scam.  The updating never stopped, even when I rebooted and rebooted BUT if you checked the downloading status there were no files being uploaded and none pending.  A google search revealed that other users had also experienced this never-ending downloading.  That's when I knew I was in trouble. After a while I discovered that my Office 2010 Starter had been removed from my PC (HP Pavilion running Win 7 HE with IE 11 browser) as well as the Click to Run files.  The HP module to restore factory-installed files no longer worked.  SO ... I had no choice but to do a complete restore to factory settings.  It took 2 days to upload all the updates (over 300 of them) plus re-installing Adobe, Flash, Java etc etc.  I couldn't re-install IE 11 until some of the prerequisite service packs were in place.  Three days into my "new" PC I am still receiving the pop-up message box posted above.  All the updates for Office 2010 Starter have been installed through the Windows Update tool so there is no way that this is legitimate.  I hope other people will not click OK when this message is received -- it is a scam and will ruin your PC.

I feel 100% confident that Bill Gates knows far less about this problem than anyone who has posted here. Do you have any concept of the size of just the Office team, much less all of Microsoft? I agree that response to this issue has been less than stellar, but keep in mind that the people who design Word are not the same people who are responsible for updates, so it is not surprising that the most they have been able to find out is that the update is genuine. As for the answers to why now, why so ugly, why not automatic, those are answers for a different team.

If you want an answer from a Microsoft employee, then feel free to avail yourself of paid support options. But please consider that you're using a free (and outdated) Microsoft product and getting free support through these forums. Most of the people who provide this free support are volunteers, other users trying to help. A few (those identified as "Support Engineers") are employees of an outsourcing firm contracted by Microsoft to provide support. They have nothing to do with development of the software and only very limited experience in using it; their answers are based on scripts developed to address known problems and are often less helpful than response from actual users. Unfortunately, most Word "power users" do not use Word Starter, so we have no personal experience with it and have to rely on what others tell us.