Office 2003 - Icons loose their image, documents loose icon images

I received a complaint yesterday from a client who was experiencing a CSRSS.exe 100% CPU usage problem.

Microsoft's KB: Csrss.exe uses 100% of the CPU When you Right-Click an item in Explorer

We must create a new profile for the user.

When I arrived, she showed me that her Microsoft Office 2003 Professional icons were blanks. They did not have the proper image associated with them on the Start Menu. Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and other Office documents had no images on their icons either.

Having seen this before, I figured the fix for the CSRSS running at 100% would fix the problem.

That didn't do it. After the reboot into her new profile, the icons on the Start Menu and the document icons were still broken.

I have seen this before on a system we upgraded from Windows 2000 Pro to XP Pro SP2.

The fix was actually quite simple: Uninstall Office 2003, and reinstall it again.

This particular client has their Office Pro software installed via Group Policy.

So, normally, all I would have to do is uninstall and reboot. The GP would take care of the rest.

That didn't work for the previous time I had this happen, nor did it for this time either.

This is what I received for a message after starting the uninstall process:

This patch could not be opened. Verify that the patch package exists and that you can access it, or contact the application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch package.

A quick search turned up a quick fix: Microsoft KB: You receive the "This patch package could not be opened" error message in an Office program

Therein is a download to manually remove the offending Office installation from the Windows Installer database.


Okay, reboot, and guess what? No GP software install. The GP check didn't catch the removal of just the database items.

So, a manual install was in order.

Once the manual install was done, the icons worked for both the programs and their associated documents.

Now, I will need to verify the patch level of that particular Office install next week to make sure that WSUS picked up the changes! In goes a Task with reminder. ;)

If any other programs and their associated documents exibit the same issue, a reinstall is in order for them too. PDF files were affected as well.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists