Being a person that is NOT tech savvy I appreciate this comment and I also appreciate the help others offer. When a tech savvy person talks about taking the system back to before June 11th that would only apply to someone who
had backed up their computer to an external hard drive or some other memory holder correct? If we "recover" can we just recover Word programs? Will we lose all of our documents? Is there no way to access our documents? Thank you to everyone who offers help,
I just wish Microsoft would "update" a fix to the problem.
This reply may not apply to every person out there so do not flame me if it doesn't apply to you. I am only stating my own experience and that of the people I actually know and of most I have read about.
No you can't just go and recover the Word program with something like System Restore or even a backup because you have to recover its registry settings too along with the files. A complete Restore of a Backup from before June 11th SHOULD fix you right up
if you go in and turn off the Office update feature until they have this fixed.
Secondly, you personal documents should still be there even if you cannot access them with Office right now. If you get Office running again you should have access to them. But if you do a complete Restore of a Backup then any personal files created after
the Backup will not be there anymore. So, it is best if you can get Office running again without doing a complete Restore of a Backup.
If you know where you saved your files to, you should be able to get to them with Windows Explorer or My Computer. And there are other programs that recognize Office files and let you work with them. If you have one of those files you can open and even edit
your files. For instance, you can use Wordpad to look at .doc files as one example.
There may be some out there who lost their personal files with this problem but I have not met or heard of one yet. They are just unhappy to not be able to get to them with Office (and rightly so). But unless you completely Restore an actual Backup from
an earlier time, you should not lose any personal files you have created or saved. Even if you use System Restore to just restore the system to an earlier time, it will not erase your personal files.
I hope this helps.