I'm on a machine that had quite some bloat ware and no update in ages. I made all the updates, removed the bloatware and cleaned using ccleaner.

So far so good. Now excel shows some really strange behavior when I open .xls files through windows. The current behavior is: it opens a new excel process window which will then stay empty. One has then to drag the xls file into the window to open it.

I would like to restore the default behavior. So far I have tried:

• running the Microsoft Office Diagnosis
• copied excel related registry keys from a machine with working excel and imported them
• had a look into the registry entry for .xls files myself - which seems correct.

It was of no use and I'm out of ideas. I would try to avoid a reinstall as we have a very bureaucratic IT department and the machine then would be gone for some undetermined time period.

So any idea what to do would be great.