Office File Association Problems

Office File Association Problems

Have you tried to open a Word document from the Start, Documents menu only to be confronted with “cannot find xyz.doc”? How about frequent kernel32 errors in Word? Have you tried to open an Excel document or workbook only to have Excel inform you that it cannot open your file? If these sound familiar to you, the following may help alleviate the problem.

Frequent Crashes is Word:

If you’re getting more and more kenerl32 errors when opening or using work, this is often caused by the default “normal.dot” template. First, check your computer and make certain you only have one instance of this folder in the template folder, erasing all others. If you only have one of these normal.dot files, then rename it to normal.old and then restart your computer and open Word. If the problem seems to have gone away, you’ve solved the problem.

Frequent “cannot find” errors:

For some unknown reason both Excel and Word, as a office product, become unregistered as an application, thereby causing this error. Here’s a procedure to repair it.

1. Locate Excel.exe and Winword.exe on your computer. They should be located in the following folder if your Office applications were installed in their default locations: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office
2. Once you have verified the locations of these files, go to Start, Run and type: (Note that this presumes that Office has been installed in its default location. Amend the command line to reflect the correct location if different.
3. “c:\program files\microsoft office\excel.exe” /regserver (then touch enter)
4. next, type the following:
5. “c:\program files\microsoft office\winword.exe” /regserver (then touch enter)
6. Now restart your computer and test it.