Ah progress - you gotta love it. Fewer choices, less control the dumbing down of the masses.

I'm checking out some old code that I've used to load Word documents for editing into a Web Browser control. It appears that under Vista this doesn't work any longer as a Word document now refuses to load into the Web browser control. I'm not sure if the issue is one of security in Windows or whether Word has simply lost the ability to act as an ActiveDocument container. I can't get it to work either way in a Web Browser control or for external documents. Other documents like PDF loading into FoxIt seem to work fine displaying inside the browser, so I suspect this is a Word issue.

Anyway, I tried looking around for File Options which used to be found in the Explorer menu's Tools | Options | File Types tab. That tab no longer exists and the associations have moved to the Default Programs Control Panel Window | Associate a File with a Program. Unfortunately you can only associate - the options of the old dialogs have disappeared.

So does anybody know if it's still possible to load Word documents in IE? I have a couple of document management apps that more or less relied on this mechanism for viewing content. While the app still works the external document really screws with the way the app flows.

Anybody know?