SharePoint 2013 IE11 and the Word Viewer

Question

My client has the Word Viewer installed with the compatibility pack. The Word Viewer will open files from seemingly anywhere but SharePoint. The Excel Viewer and PowerPoint Viewer are also installed and both work great. Has anyone seen this been and resolved the issue without resorting to Office Web Apps?

Answer 1

Found a reg key that fixes the issue. Specifically the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.docx\UserChoice key below. I added all the keys we tested just in case someone else runs into this and UserChoice isn't the only required key.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.docx]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.docx\OpenWithList]
"a"="WORDVIEW.EXE"
"MRUList"="ab"
"b"="IEXPLORE.EXE"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.docx\OpenWithProgids]
"docxfile"=hex(0):
"Word.Document.12"=hex(0):

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.docx\UserChoice]
"Progid"="Applications\\WORDVIEW.EXE"

Answer 2

I've never seen it work in IE11.

This thread at MSDN forums ended up with no solution.

Try Chrome or downgrade to IE9