I installed Office Pro Plus 2010 on my Vista OS computer in Dec 2011 and it worked fine till Feb 20, 2012 when I could not open any program on Pro Plus and got two different error messages.
C:\ProgramFiles\MicrosoftOffice\Office 14\winword.exe
This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel.
OR
This application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more details.
I could not find anything of the above doing searches everywhere on the computer. I started doing internet searches and on Microsoft website but nothing made it easy to correct this problem. I finally found one web site that mentioned Microsoft Visual C ++ as important to this problem but I found that I had the 2005 edition of it on my computer. Looking more on the internet I found a site that had a chart the listed all the editions of Visual C ++ and how it worked with the different editions of Office. It stated for Pro Plus 2010 I needed at least 2008 or 2010 editions of Visual C ++. So I downloaded the 2008 edition of Visual C ++ but it did not help but I remembered that it said get the update SP1 also so I did that shut down my computer and by the grace of God all my Microsoft Office Professional Pro Plus 2010 works once again. I spent over a 100 hours trying to get it back and its all in how you put in the search wording. I found so many solutions that required so much knowledge of computers or words that said you may mess up the computer going into the registry if you make a mistake, and ones that want you to download a program to get out some malware that is the cause and pay for it. Others that made no sense but this title and answered by Microsoft made me feel good opening it up, thanks.