Fixing broken Office 2010 icons

A few weeks back a Windows Update install left my machine hanging and I was forced to reboot even though the screen said 'don't restart or all hell will break loose!' All hell then broke loose.

Or at least the icons for my Office 2010 applications disappeared, having been replaced by the unhelpul default icon.

I don't seem to be the only one to have experienced this exact sequence of events but the usual places for help offered none. There were many suggestions to rebuild icon caches but navigating to the relevant directory in my case revealed it didn't exist. Someone even mentioned a virus uncovered during ten hours of MS support telephoning! I continued hoping Windows Update would come to my rescue with an update for the update but nothing was forthcoming. In fact, I noticed more and more updates were now failing, particularly with error codes 80070643 and 80070644 noted (i.e. during the SP1 update and for a Definition Update).

Worst of all I couldn't initiate an Office repair from the Programs and Features menu—not sure if my machine was in an inconsistent state but opting to Change my install would bring up the Office 2010 change/repair initialisation screen before it would quickly disappear.

Thankfully Hitescape, in one of the many forums I visited, suggested running winword /r from a command prompt fixed the problem for them. Apparently this kicks off the Office repair function. I gave it a go and watched my icons return to their proper place on my task bar one by one! Just for kicks, I then attempted my to install the long list of failed updates and they all went in nicely!

Ps. I should mention I also followed these steps to ‘fix’ my .NET 4 install before I resorted to the above: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/KB976982 No idea if it made any difference.

Btw, I'm running Windows 7 Enterprise x64 with Office 2010 Professional Plus x32 (RTM at the time).

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