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This has happened a few times on our staff laptops. A user has recieved a .doc attachment in Outlook 2007 but when they double click on the attchment it opens word but not the attachment (such as the image below). This can also affect word documents in the computer, i.e. desktop, and in work areas. Also, when you try to quit Word it crashes with "Word is not responding". enter image description here Before we've got around this by deleting the (local) profiles which seems a bit drastic and a web search shows a lot of identical/similar problems but no concrete answer.

Windows 7, 32-bit, No SP1 installed (yet) Office Enterprise 2007.

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3 Answers

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This happens sometimes when you already activated the document preview feature and want to open it in the "real" application (Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc.).

I know of no way to prevent this from happening, except not to display the attachment in the preview mode first.

Same problem occurs also with Windows Explorer's Preview pane.

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I can have the preview open on my computer and when I double click on the attachment it opens just fine. – tombull89 May 16 '11 at 12:00
Perhaps you have a fast computer. On my work PC, it takes time for the preload engine to initialize, and if you double click the file in that period Office sometimes skips a beat and can't cope. – Bora May 16 '11 at 12:49
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I've finally found an answer that works.

Involves editing registry. Make sure you don't delete the wrong bit or you could wreck your machine. Not my fault if this happens.

  • Check that Word is closed. Open RegEdit and find:

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data

  • Delete the whole "Data" folder and subkeys.

  • Thats's it!

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And what does this do exactly? – Bora Sep 13 '11 at 9:46
@Bora, it deletes (and then re-creates) the users profile settings. For more information, see this Microsoft KB article and this one too. – tombull89 Sep 13 '11 at 9:50
I've answered this myself (and accepted it) as it was not just happening with Outlook, so unfotunately your "don't display the preview" was not an answer. – tombull89 Sep 13 '11 at 9:56
No it's okay, I was just curious how you solved it.. – Bora Sep 13 '11 at 10:29
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up vote 1 down vote

Deleting the folder and sub keys in regedit fixes until the folder is rebuilt, it won't fix it after the first restart if you have Classic Menue for 2007 installed

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