Unable to open Word or Excel attachments recd in email

Hi,

I am running Vista Home Premium and Office Professional 2007. Over the past
4-5 days, I have not been able to open any Word or Excel files that I receive
as attachment to my emails (in Outlook 2007). I have to save the files to a
location and then open them from the application - double clicking on the
file also does not work.

I have not made any changes to my computer - the only relevant info that I
can remember was that there was an update to Ofce that was installed a few
days back.

I also use another program called GoldMine and I am facing the same problem
there - when I click on the attachment, getting a message : Cannot
RunC:......xls or .doc ShellExec Error:2

Would be very grateful for any suggestions or help on how to rectify this.

Thank oyu