office 2007 documents trying to open with winzip

I have an issue where a windows xp machine is having problems downloading office 2007 files from sharepoint sites.

When you click on the file whether it be excel, word or powerpoint - i've been testing with an excel file (test.xlsx), it prompts you to either open the file using winzip or save it with a .zip extension.

We would like the files to open using Office 2003 (with the compatibility pack installed to open 2007 documents)

There is only one machine having this problem that i've encountered, we have multiple machines that can download these files and open them fine using office 2003.

It is just this one machine that is having the issue where it asks you to save it as a .zip file or open it using winzip.

I've researched the problem online and a few sites have mentioned that you need to make a 'MIME' change on the server, however I dont think that is necessary as it seems only one machine is effected at this time.

Things i've tried to resolve it:

- reinstalled office

- uninstalled\reinstalled winzip

- compared the file associations for .zip and .xlsx on a working machine and the problematic machine (they are identical)

- tried deleting the file association for .zip and .xlsx

- upgraded the machine to IE 7 (it was using 6 before)

I dont want to install firefox even though that would probably work as firefox is not our company standard and i'd like to avoid rebuiling the machine as I'm afraid we might get more reports of this problem

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

 

if you save it and rename it, you are able to open the document.

However this is not an acceptable solution for the users as they are opening multiple files during the day...also they've been able to open the files without renaming them in the past

 

Same issue with new profiles on that machine.