Unable to open Word files after September 2013 update

The September 2013 updates for Microsoft Office have caused problems for many Word users by somehow damaging the file associations for Word and other Office applications. These problems may be evidenced by any of the following symptoms:

• The file icons are orange instead of blue.
• Double-clicking on a Word document in Window Explorer generates an an error message (“The Office product necessary to open this file is not installed on this computer”) accompanied by a suggestion to purchase/install Office 2010 (or 2013?) or to sign up for a 30-day trial of Office 365.
• A prompt to enter the product key.
• A message that "This program is unable to run because of missing or corrupted files. Contact your computer manufacturer." Naturally, this is very alarming.

In most cases, however, users are still able to open Word files normally by launching Word first and then selecting the desired file from Word’s Open dialog.

While I have not personally experienced the problems reported by many users (despite having four versions of Word installed), I have been reading all the many threads on this subject and, I believe, have boiled down the replies to a set of solutions.

Please read carefully: the solution for Word 2010 Starter is different from the solution for Word 2010 and other versions.

Word 2010 Starter only

The users who seem to be suffering most are those who are using Office 2010 Starter. This is a free, advertising-supported version of Word and Excel installed by OEMs on new computers. It is not supported by Microsoft, only by the OEM, and once it is uninstalled, it is not possible to reinstall it except by performing a recovery installation with the OEM’s restore disk. Needless to say, Word Starter users who were told that this version would never expire are dismayed (to say the least) to find it suddenly not working, especially given the alarming suggestion that they need to upgrade to another version.

Never fear—this is not true! Office Starter is free and does not expire, and the message you are getting is a mistake!

There are two sites that offer the standard, official advice for repairing or reinstalling Office Starter. These are a Microsoft Knowledge Base article and a Help articleprovided for users of HP systems. In the current situation, both of them are more likely to be harmful than helpful, so I do not advise consulting either one; if you do, do not follow the instructions to uninstall/reinstall Office Starter (only to repair), as this procedure does not result in a dialog allowing you to “Use Office Starter 2010” but instead an offer to try Office 365.

Instead, follow this procedure:

1. In Windows Explorer, right-click on a Word file.
2. Choose Open With, then Choose Default Program.
3. If you see “Microsoft Office Client Virtualization Handler,” choose that.
4. Making sure that the box for “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” is checked, click OK.

If you don't see "Microsoft Office Client Virtualization Handler," do nothing and wait for a fix. You should still be able to open Word Starter and open the files from within it.

Update: The Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering Team has posted a fix procedure for Office Starter **here**.

Word 2010 (local install) and other versions

While this problem seems to be affecting primarily Office 2007 and 2010 users, the solutions should work for any version. What is needed is to repair the file associations. There are several ways to do this:

Word 2007: The simplest way to do this in Word 2007 is to go to Office Button | Word Options | Resources and click Diagnose. This will trigger a repair of all Office applications and should solve the file association problems for Word, Excel, and any other applications affected.

Other versions: If you have only one version of Word installed, you should be able to repair file associations by “reregistering” Word, that is, allowing it to reestablish its “ownership” of specific file types (.doc, .docx, .dot, .dotx, etc.) in the Windows Registry. To do this you must run a specific command in the Windows Run box. How you open this box varies depending on your OS and personal settings, but in any version of Windows, you should be able to open it by pressing the Windows Key together with R.

1. WinKey + R to open the Run box.
2. Type “winword /r” or “winword.exe /r” without the quotation marks. Note the space before the /r switch.
3. Press Enter.
4. You will probably get a message about Windows or Office reconfiguring the application. When it finishes, try again to open a Word file from Windows Explorer.

Alternatively, you can use this method:

1. In Windows Explorer, right-click on a Word file.
2. Choose Open With, then Choose Default Program.
3. If you see “Microsoft Word,” choose that.
4. Making sure that the box for “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” is checked, click OK.

 You can also see this video for further instructions.

If you have more than one version of Word installed, then in order to reregister a specific one, you have to include the entire file path to the specific executable. You can find instructions about this in

this article.

Edit (August 13, 2014): It has belatedly come to my attention that the Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering team posted a **blog post**about this subject on September 18, 2013. That should be considered the official word on the subject.