I use Office 2003 on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.
Doc and docx files are set to open with Word.
There is no problem with doc and docx files automatically opening with Word. No problem viewing and editing them.
PROBLEM: doc files are not viewable in Preview Panes of Windows Explorer (nor in preview panes of other file managing apps).

In my "Set Associations" window, doc (etc) files are shown as using Word as their default app.
But if I go to "Change Program" window, it surprisingly shows WordPad as the default.
Clicking on Word did not succeed in changing it to show Word as the default app.
So I Browsed to winword.exe (on my system at D:\TEXT\Microsoft Office 2003\OFFICE11\WINWORD.EXE) and set it as default app that way.
But I still find that if I later go to "Change program" again, it always reverts to showing WordPad as the default again. Here is screen cap:
Word or WordPad -300kb.jpg

Everything about automatically opening, viewing and editing doc files works fine. The ONLY problem is inability to view the contents in Preview panes. I would like very much to regain this ability (which I have not had for a long time). Do not know what was done to the system way-back-when which caused this problem.

Thanks very much for any help.
Janet