Windows Explored

In technical support, there is a common knee-jerk reaction when something doesn’t work in Microsoft Office: run a repair of the product or reinstall it. My colleagues have probably spent several hours combined going through this step countless times. Often (often is 99% of time) this fails to resolve whatever issue they are encountering. Over the course of a few years of troubleshooting Office, a repair has only corrected an issue once ( or maybe twice). In our case, it’s the nature of the custom environment that is chock-full-o-add-ins. Other times it is some weird, unexplained element of a document, spreadsheet, or whatever that just doesn’t want to work. Those can be rather complex to figure out sometimes.

That being said, sometimes repairing MS Office fixes issues in areas you might not otherwise think.  For example, I recently setup a small document library in SharePoint, but while trying to edit the files from Internet Explorer some of the tech workstations were reporting the following error: “Windows Internet Explorer – ‘Edit Document’ requires a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible application and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or greater.”

I had previously run into this several times and usually the resolution was to go to Add or Remove Programs, select Microsoft Office, then Change, select Add or Remove Features, and put a check mark in Choose advanced customization of applications. From here, you only needed expand Office Tools and install Windows SharePoint Services Support.

In a few cases, though, the SharePoint Services were already installed and reinstalling did not correct the issue. The next step was to attempt to unregister and reregister Owssupp.dll (the Microsoft SharePoint Client Support module) via regsvr32; this, too, did not help, returning a warning: “DllUnrgisterServer in…. Return code was: 0x80070716”:

(Actually, this warning is somewhat benign and does not actually represent a real problem)

To see what might be missing, I turned to Process Monitor and collected a trace of the regvr32.exe process as it failed. 12,000 operations revealed only SUCCESS and NAME NOT FOUND. Luckily, NAME NOT FOUND results were only 173 and I should be able to spot anything obvious. From the bottom, I scanned up and came across the likely culprits, some missing SharePoint registry keys that related to opening office items:

I connected to a workstation that did not exhibit the same problem and saw that HKCR contained the keys that were not found above:

There should have also been an add-on in IE for the OpenDocumentsClass for SharePoint (not present on the problem workstation) like in the example here:

Resolving the missing SharePoint OpenDocument Class simply required running a repair of Office to reinstall it.