Hello! I've tried just about everywhere to find a solution to my problem, and I've become very frustrated. :|

At any rate, I've had Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 installed on my PC for about a year. I'd never had any issues. Everything worked fine. One day, I went to open Word, and it gave me this error message:



'This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel.'

Please note that I'm not trying to open a specific file. I'm trying to open Word in general. Out of curiosity, I went to see if the other applications of Office did the same thing, and to no surprise, they did. I am not able to use any of my Office applications because of this. Not only does it tell me that, but every now and then, instead of a program association error, I will get this:

'This application has failed to start because the side by side configuration is incorrect.'

I have tried the Office repair, uninstalling and installing Office, .exe registry fixes, and a few other things - only to get the same two error messages. I really need these programs for work and school. Anyone else have this problem or maybe a solution? Thanks in advance.

hi kamberly,

The 'This application has failed to start because the side by side configuration is incorrect.' error is typically associated with a missing/damaged Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library. Try downloading & reinstalling the runtime from: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en...ylang=en&id=29
See also the vista-related registry patches at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2525435, which also relates the 'This file association does not have a program associated with if for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Association control panel' message to the same issue.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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.

Hi frydrychowski,

FWIW, no-one here works for Microsoft.

For the "This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action' problem, right-click on a Word document in Windows Explorer, select 'Open With', then select Word as the program to open it with. See also: http://word.mvps.org/faQs/AppErrors/ReRegisterWord.htm

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]