My 1.8 GHz Phenom X4 64-bit system with Vista Home Premium 64 suddenly had this ‘unable to find’ problem. I lived with this for several weeks.

For other reasons, I wanted to boost my overall system performance without spending $$$ for a new CPU, so went looking for software solutions to get around this locked CPU – no overclocking allowed via BIOS. I found and installed K10STAT which worked fine. Now I was running at 2.5 GHz high and 1.1 GHz slow; this system throttles down to save power when the fast speed is not needed, using less power and keeping things quiet. Checking, I found the CPU temperature went up about 5 degrees F, and this was well within the chip’s limits.

Much to my surprise, the problem with MS Word not finding the document was totally gone!

My conclusion: one of the automatic Vista 64 updates increased the ‘find the file’ processing time, and this caused my Word 2003 to time out before the OS got there with the file. With the increased CPU speed, this was gone. Whether this is correct or not, I’ll never know. But the problem is gone!

Note that K10STAT only works, I’ve read, with AMD CPUs. Maybe overclocking an Intel CPU would solve the problem.

My mistake was that I was uninstalling the Office and then installing it, with some old Office registry entries still present. The uninstall function does not clear all Office registry entries.

Here is what to do:

1. Uninstall office

2. Go to regedit

3. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft

4. Right-click and delete the ‘Office’ key

Then,

1. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > Software > Microsoft

2. Right-click and delete the ‘Office’ key

Then, if you have one, run the registry cleaner, for example Registry Mechanic.

Then, fresh-install the Office.

This should do. It solved the problem for me. I tried many solutions recommended on internet, but nothing else worked.

After 18 months and finally getting sick of this error message, i found your site.

This works perfectly (after also deleting the command key)

Thanks a million,
P

I navigated like instructed and deleted the ddeexec key and also modified the Command/default key.

This still did not work until I also deleted the Command/command key. This key had very strange character sequences that did not make any sense. Not sure how it was there or why it was modified to garbled character strings.

The important thing is Thank You! Working on this issue for two days until I stumbled across your solution!