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There is an add-on called BetterPrivacy, which works in Firefox (don’t know about Pale Moon), described as a “Super-Cookie Safeguard”, which will delete unwanted Flash cookies.

RolandJS, if you read post #7 (my last), you will see that the problem is related to a setting in Word called Protected View. When I turn that option off in Word, .docx attachments will open normally in Outlook. If I turn it back on, the problem comes back. So my question then was: is this a bug, either in Word or in Outlook?

With due respect to all the others who replied, the question was not about the respective merits of other office type programs, it was about a possible bug in Microsoft Office.

I now have that option permanently turned off in Word, and no longer have the problem.

As this has affected more than one user, it would seem that the messages were actually being sent in plain text format, or possibly in Rich Text format? I don’t know much about RTF, or whether such a message would have active links, but in my Outlook settings there is an option “When sending messages in Rich Text format to internet recipients…..”, where the options are “Convert to HTML format”, “Convert to Plain Text format”, and “Send using Outlook Rich Text format”. It is possible that this option was set incorrectly at the sending end, but has recently been fixed.

Problem solved (sort of). In Word, I had enabled Protected View for Outlook attachments (it’s a setting in Trust Center). Seemed like a good idea at the time, but when I disabled this, Word attachments would then open normally.

The little Help bubble on this setting says “when selected, attachments opened from Outlook 2016 will open in Protected View”. Not so in my case – they would not open at all. So unless there is another setting, I will have to open Word attachments without Protected View enabled – which doesn’t worry me too much.

Is this a setting in Word that does not work properly, or am I still missing something?

If I save the attached file to another location, it will then open correctly in Word. This indicates that there is nothing wrong with either the attached file, or with Word itself. Word works perfectly in all other respects, so I don’t believe I need the viewer.

If I save it to the same temporary folder that Outlook uses, which is effectively what Outlook does, Word cannot open it and throws the same error. However, if I save it at the next level up, still within Temporary Internet Files, Word will open it correctly. This seems to confirm the error message: a problem with file permissions. I need help from someone who knows about these.

The structure wirthin the Temporary Internet Files folder is like this:

C:Temporary Internet FilesContent Outlook7UYK5URL If I save the attachment into 7UYK5URL, which is what Outlook does, I cannot open it with Word and I get the error. But if I save it into Content Outlook (one level up), Word will open it normally. So there must be a difference in the permissions of the two sub-folders, but I cannot see it. Looking at the Security settings for each, they appear to be identical, and both say that their permissions are inherited from C: .

To further confuse the issue, other types of attachments (.jpg, .pdf, xlsx, .txt) will open normally, and they get placed into the same 7UYK5URL folder. So there seems to be something different about Word? Maybe the problem really is with Word after all? I don’t get it. Is there a setting within Word that I should change?

For what it’s worth, I did download the viewer and tried it out. It couldn’t open a .docx file, as it dates from the old Word 2003 days (it offered to download the Compatibility Pack), but I found another email with a .doc attachment, and Outlook could open that using the viewer.

The temporary folder gets emptied automatically when Outlook is closed.

Office quick repair did not solve the problem. Office online repair took “forever”, because it downloads and re-installs the entire package, but did not solve the problem either.

I tried deleting and re-creating the Temporary Internet Files folder, but that also did not solve the problem. The only difference is that I do not now have an Edit option in the right-click context menu. This indicates a problem with the permissions for the temporary folder, as the error message says – previously I could right-click and edit, now I cannot.

So now I am totally unable to open a Word attachment in Outlook. Help please !!

Off topic, but we have a Kings Canyon in Australia as well: http://www.australia.com/en/places/red-centre/kings-canyon.html

These are the times that try men’s souls ….

Thanks Lugh, that’s the information I wanted. Have set it to always block, and now I am not seeing the warning any more. Because it only started happening a few days ago, I’m guessing it was triggered by an updated malware definition. But still curious to know why the WS website wants to connect to it…??

I have a similar problem. From time to time, whatever program I am in stops responding so I can’t type or do anything (it will sometimes say “Not responding”), and the cursor turns into a whirlygig. This might last for a few seconds, or for a minute or more. I have monitors in place for both CPU usage and disk usage, and during this time there is no unusual activity for either. There is other stuff running, like AV, but nothing exceptional. It’s as though the system is just waiting for something, but I don’t know what. Like the OP, I have run all the checks I can think of, and no malware is reported. It seems to happen most in Word and Outlook, but maybe that’s just because I use them the most – it can happen in other programs as well. During the time that a program is locked up like that, I can move to another program and it will work normally.

I’m thinking that perhaps some resource limit has been reached, and the system is waiting for it to clear?

Running Win10, 64 bits, 8 gig of memory (of which less than half is in use at the time), and about 887 Gig of free space on drive C.

I use and recommend John’s Background Switcher. It’s free, and changes the picture every x minutes. In a dual monitor setup, it can display different pictures on each monitor. It will also display file names if you want, and the border colour is automatic, based on the predominant colour in the picture.

To do it manually, you should be able to highlight the messages you want to move, right-click, then select “Move” or “Move to folder”, and select the folder you want to move them to. This is a move, not a copy. I’m not familiar with Outlook 2010, but in 2016 I can set up a rule which is applied after a message is sent. I go to Rules and Alerts > New Rule > Apply rule on messages I send > Next > and then I see the list of conditions I want to set up.

Weird. If you have Process Monitor, try running Outlook with PM turned on. It will produce a large trace with thousands of entries, but somewhere in there you may see where the photos are coming from. You can get Process Monitor (it’s free) from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processmonitor .

When/if you run it, set up a filter which says “If process name is Outlook.exe then include”, and “If process name is not Outlook.exe then exclude”. Then you will only see trace entries generated by Outlook.

Have you tried running Outlook in safe mode? Outlook.exe /safe .

The only other thing I would want is to be able to copy individual files (as opposed to the entire backup) from the backups to the computer.

You can do that with Macrium Reflect. In the “Restore” tab, and with your backup disk attached, select “Open an image or backup file in Windows Explorer”. Select the image file that you want, give it a drive letter, and then it will show up in Windows Explorer (or similar) as a drive, from which you can copy individual files. Then do “Detach a backup image ….” when finished.

Just a thought, but you don’t say (I think?) what anti-virus program you are using. Some AV programs have email scanners included, and if they see something in the HTML code that they don’t like, they may convert a message to plain text. There could be something in the WS Newsletters which is setting this off, and the recent recurrence could be due to an updated definition. If your AV has such a scanner, try turning it off. The links to unsubscribe etc. at the end of a Newsletter would still work, because they are email addresses and not URLs.