Windows 7 keeps changing a file association and I don't know how to stop it

Question

I'm trying to help someone solve a file association problem on Windows 7. We live in different countries (USA, Canada) so I can't just go over to her home and sit down in front of the system, and neither of us has any software that would let me see her system remotely.

I've tried the most obvious solutions and have been Googling and so far I haven't found a way to fix this.

Here's the problem;

She has both Office 2003 and Office 2007 installed under Windows 7. She prefers 2003 and has been using it for years. Someone else installed 2007 and although she doesn't use it, she doesn't want to uninstall it. Up until recently, there was no problem, all documents opened in Word 2003 like she wanted.

A while back, she injured her wrist, making it difficult for her to type until it heals. She wanted to try speech recognition for entering text. For some reason, that made Word 2007 the default program for documents.

First thing I had her try was right-clicking and selecting "Open With...", then manually selecting Word 2003. She said there were two entries for "Word" and it didn't indicate the versions. She tried setting it to both, but Word 2007 kept coming up.

Next, I had her go into the directory for Office 2007 ("Office12") and rename "Winword.exe" to "Winword.tmp". That worked for about a month, then Word 2007 suddenly started coming up again. When I had her check the directory, there was a new "Winword.exe". If she renames it, it just re-installs a new copy of it. She even renamed the entire directory and it was about to re-install it again before she stopped it.

Something is causing her copy of Windows to be obsessed with using Word 2007 to open documents. All the results I found just say to use "Open With..." to associate documents with the version you want. She even tried going through the app in the Control panel to set associations and despite setting ".DOC" files to the EXE for Word 2003, they still open in Word 2007. Yes, the box for "Always use this program" was checked, although she said it was grayed out (unclickable).

There's a "Detect and repair" option in the Word Help menu, but she's afraid to use it in case it messes up any of her settings and I can't even find a full description of exactly what that will do.

She doesn't want to uninstall Office 2007 because she likes having it in case she ever wants/needs it, but at this point, I don't know what else to tell her to try. I'm not even 100% confident that it wouldn't just try to re-install the whole thing if she deleted it.

How can you stop Windows from re-associating documents with Word 2007 and/or disable Word 2007 to prevent it it from running without uninstalling it?

Answer 1

Use a third-party tool such as Nirsoft's free File Types Manager, which shows all file associations and allows editing of the applications used to create and open a particular file type.

That said, from your description of the issue, the settings may not "stick", or may be altered each time she runs Windows Speech Recognition. If so, here are some other options:

• Correct the issue in FileTypesMan, and then select Open File Type in RegEdit. Right-click on the key in RegEdit and export it to a .reg file. If the issue recurs, just run the .reg file bty double-clicking it to revert to the correct value.
• To lock the file type somewhat, in FileTypesMan, correct the Open application and then right-click on the file type, select Open File Type in RegEdit, and use Permissions to change ownership to NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller. Caveat that may break some other feature of Windows.
• Try an alternative speech recognition application, such as CMU Sphinx.