Jeff writes in with an Office question
Q. Suddenly my home PC does not recognize Word docs copied to a Flash drive from my Laptop. I can still open them by going to OPEN and then Open with Office Word but previously could click on the file icon and go directly to MS Word and the file opened. Any ideas what happened? Now if I do that, I go to a page in Mozilla and dozens and dozens of "untitled" docs begin loading and never end. I can live with doing the extra step but is there any fix to why PC no longer "recognizes" Word docs??
A. It sounds as though the .doc file extension used by Word has become associated with Firefox somehow. Windows uses file extensions to determine what program to open certain types of files with. These can be easily changed manually or perhaps by some type of virus or spyware. If your computer is set to hide extensions for known file types then you wont see the .doc on the end of your Word documents. You can change this setting from the View tab under Folder Options.
You should check the file association for Word documents to make sure that its associated with Word and not Firefox.
Finally I would run some spyware and maybe virus scans to make sure your computer is not infected with some malware. You can start with Spybot and AdAware since they are free. You may want to do them in Safe Mode for best results.
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