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The thread was closed after this last post. Registry edits were suggested. That sounds quite easy compared to dealing with the ongoing file save problem.
Would you please tell me how to manually correct the file associations in the registry?
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.
Just a note: cccleaner is not recommended. I'm glad you've found a resolution.
Glad to hear that you have finally overcome the problem.
I have no idea of the origin of the ".dotm_auto_file" type and it is definitely an aberration. It's probably too late now, but it would have been interesting to see the effect of using the "Choose a default" for that file type and selecting Word as the default.
1 year and 3 months after this problem struck (following an update), the problem has been solved!
I searched the registry for _auto_file and found a few entries, some with corruption indicators, like symbol characters and odd shapes for entry titles.
I deleted all and rebooted, without change. I then tried to do an online re-installation, which just hung. It did work in the past since the initial problem, but never solved it.
So I ran cccleaner (groan... :), which reported gads of errors, notable some with the .dotm and _auto_file. So I cleaned and repeated twice more, each time finding similar unlinked references, until no errors were found.
Reboot and another attempt at online reinstall and SUCCESS :-)))
I've already tried that twice. The thread in the first post links to the previous thread on this subject.
The dotm_AUTO_FILE thing came up last time too. It seems relevant since it is odd and only appears for the file I have problems with.
Google search brings up nothing for _AUTO_FILE. Any thoughts? I'm going to start searching the registry
Did you run an On-Line repair of the Office installation? If not, try repairing the Office installation as detailed in the Knowledge Base article at: