Microsoft Excel : How to repair "Opening blank file when double clicking on an excel file"

Ran into an interesting problem with troubleshooting an Excel issue. Double clicking on an excel file opened a blank file on the affected machine. I thought it might be something related to the associations and checked them from “Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types” in the Windows Explorer menu. Everything was in order there. I then tried a reinstall of Office (note : would not do this in the future without additional troubleshooting 🙂 ). That didn’t help either. Finally, I gave up and did a Google search, which returned this URL

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.office.misc/browse_thread/thread/aa3da7b29cd55a93/3347ca4c2ea6673a%233347ca4c2ea6673a

Did the following according to the post and everything returned to default settings

1) Run Excel with “/safe” option.
2) Click on “help -> Detect and Repair” from the Excel menu
3) Close Excel for repair

Thx Google.