Microsoft Starter Edition Not working?

Had a phone call from one of my extremely important clients yesterday.  (My sister!).  She was working from home and could not get her laptop to play nice with Microsoft Office Starter edition.  It is a version that came with her Laptop and is enough for her, she is not interested in more that Word and Excel.

It was working ok last week she told me and could not understand why all of a sudden it did not want to work. 

As a quick "get you back up and running as I have to go out" fix I got OpenOffice up running for her.  While I was out I did a quick search on the internet to see if there was anyone else with the same apparently sudden issue.

There was.

It appears that the most recent round of Microsoft updates changed all her file associations.  The icons appearing in windows explorer were different.  It seems that it was looking for a different version of Office and was kindly offering the purchase of the full licence showing the window below - sneaky!

 

I was able to sort her laptop out later on so that she was able to use her Starter edition again and be more productive on her work from home day.

The website I found useful - it is much more eloquent and detailed that I could hope to be was :
 
http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2013/09/18/office-2010-starter-edition-file-type-associations-missing-after-september-2013-update.aspx

Have a good day, everyone.  I am off to walk the newest addition to the Lamas team, Lamas Dog!