Number: IRCNE2013091966
Date: 2013/09/20
According to “zdnet”, Microsoft yesterday acknowledged yet another problem with its Sept. 10 updates, confirming that one of those fixes broke Office 2010 Starter Edition by changing the file associations of already-created documents.
"After installing this update, some users have reported they are unable to open files by double-clicking them, that the file type icons have changed, and that they must go to the application to open files," Microsoft's Office team said in a company blog post Wednesday.
Some customers, said Microsoft, were even told that they needed to buy a copy of the full-scale Office, which starts at $140 for Office Home & Student 2013.
Naturally, that caused some customers to wig out, as their suite -- Office 2010 Starter Edition -- had come free with their PCs.
Within hours of the Sept. 10 updates -- part of a larger-than-average Patch Tuesday slate -- users began reporting problems on Microsoft's support forums.
"The operating system has lost the association between a file type and the application that it is supposed to open it," said the Office team. "This does not change the file, this only affects the relationship between the operating system and the applications associated with the documents."
The company showed users how to reestablish file associations, but warned that in some cases customers may need to repair Office 2010 Starter Edition using the "Uninstall or change a program" Control Panel tool.
Microsoft has been publicly apologetic at times, but has not said specifically what it will do to prevent flawed updates in the future. "I apologize again for the difficulty this has created," wrote Gray Knowlton, a principal group program manager for Office, on the Patchmangement.org mailing list, or listserv. Microsoft's next regularly scheduled updates are to ship Oct. 8.
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