Uninstalling Word Viewer 97 does not restore WordPad associations

If you install Microsoft Word Viewer 97 and then remove it, after you remove it, files that end in .doc will not be re-associated with Microsoft Windows WordPad.

When you remove Word Viewer, the registry key that associates .doc files with a program is removed isntead of re-associated with Windows WordPad.

This problem is fixed in the Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003.

For additional information on how to obtain the latest version of the Microsoft Word Viewer, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

To work around this problem, follow these steps:

1. Start WordPad.
   
   This will re-create the registry entry and re-associate .doc files with WordPad.
2. Double-click a file that has a .doc extension.
   
   The Open With dialog box will be displayed.
3. Click WordPad as the application to open .doc files and enable the "Always use this program to open this type of file" check box.

The correct registry entry will be written and WordPad will be used to open all files with the .doc extension.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.
This problem was first corrected in Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003.

You can use the Microsoft Word 97-2000 Viewer to view documents created in Microsoft Word 97, in Microsoft Word 2000, in Microsoft Word 2002 and in Microsoft Office Word 2003.