We have our Word templates located in one location, but provide shortcuts to the templates for the user to use in another location. Our"Workgroup Templates" location within Word points to the folder with those shortcuts.

When the user opens one of those templates from within Word (File -> New -> Shared) the template shows gibberish and asks or what type of encoding to use. However, if the user manually opens the folder within Windows Explorer and double clicks on the shortcut, or if the user opens the template from the "Open" menu item (File -> Open) instead of the "New" menu item the template displays properly. Also, this is only an issue on 32-bit machines. An install on a 64-bit OS works as expected.

What it looks like when opening from "File -> New -> Shared"

What seems to be happening is that Word is treating the shortcut file as the template, instead of the file that the shortcut is pointing to. (it's trying to open the .lnk file as a template, not the .dotx destination file.)

I'm not sure why this is happening in 32-bit and not 64-bit, and unfortunately most of our environment is still running Windows 7 32-bit currently.

Does anyone know of a fix for this, short of using one of those work around scenarios (having the user open it from Windows Explorer or "Open" instead of "New"?) Is there maybe a hotfix somewhere that fixes this issue? Is there some reason that this is only an issue on 32-bit machines? Any suggestions would be welcomed.