MS Office 2003 Stops Opening Files

In September of last year, Microsoft released Service Pack 3 for its Microsoft Office 2003 system.  Along with fixing numerous bugs, they seem to have caused another.  To sum things up, Service Pack 3 disables a users ability to open pre Office 2003 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) documents.

Today I got a call from one of my users with the error message "You are attempting to open a file type that is blocked by your registry policy setting."

The user in this case was trying to import a .RUN file from Land Desktop’s pipe works directory.  In essence the file is really nothing more than a CSV file with a different extension.  Knowing we hadn’t applied any new security policies or the like, my initial reaction was "say what".  Finally after digging I discovered it’s cause, and more importantly – it’s solution.

Once again, the cause is quite simply Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3 (SP3) disabling certain file types.  The excluded file types must be re-enabled using the registry. 

A full outline for doing this can be found in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938810/en-us

You can use REGEDIT to manually add/change the needed values.  On the other hand Microsoft has actually been kind enough to provide some REG files which will perform the fix automatically.

• Microsoft Word 2003 – http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/8/B/28B644CE-9A30-4D99-AFEF-830A4FB5B839/UnblockWord.reg
• Microsoft Excel 2003 – http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/8/B/28B644CE-9A30-4D99-AFEF-830A4FB5B839/UnblockExcel.reg
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 – http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/8/B/28B644CE-9A30-4D99-AFEF-830A4FB5B839/UnblockPowerPoint.reg
• CorelDraw (CDR) Files – http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/8/B/28B644CE-9A30-4D99-AFEF-830A4FB5B839/UnblockCDR.reg

Be sure any MS Office products are closed, and simply double-click the downloaded REG files to add to your registry.  Afterwards you should be able to open the same files you were able to pre SP3.