IE or Contract Management v13 thinks my DOCX file is a zip

Question

When trying to open an attachment IE or Contract Management v13 thinks my DOCX file is a zip. This started last Thursday. Outta the blue. We’ve been searching for a days now for a solution. Nothing has helped. I have a few hundred users all with various combinations of applications on their boxes. XP PRO, Windows 7, Office; 2007, 2010, WordPerfect 5.1 files work just fine. :)

Answer 1

We are having the same problem and are wondering whether you found a solution. A workaround is to disable MIME handling in IE (this is what Oracle support will suggest), but this is far from ideal as it does compromise security slightly.
The problem arises when WebLogic (or JBoss, WebSphere....) sends the file to your browser. It marks the file as Content type "application/octet-stream" instead of identifying it as a MS Word 2010 document. This causes IE to try to identify the type itself. First it checks the extension of the file and looks in the registry to see what's there. If it finds an entry, it then reads the first part of the file to see if the content matches what the registry says. Something appears to be broken in the way IE identifies Word 2007+ files, causing it to identify them as .zip files. Users are then prompted to save the file to their desktop.
Word 2007+ files actually ARE zip files under the hood, but until recently we had no problem with them. There appear to be three possible routes to resolve this issue.
One, take Oracle's "pass the buck" advice and disable MIME handling in IE so that IE no longer tries to identify the file (registry hack set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MIME_HANDLING\iexplore.exe to 0). This bypasses the problem and introduces security holes to your workstation configuration.
Two, configure your Java application server to send the files with the correct content-type header. I can't find a way to do this in WebLogic so far as you have to modify the web.xml file, which is created by the application installation/deployment. Oracle Primavera CM support has yet to respond to my request on this other than to say "consult WebLogic support". Oracle WebLogic's support will (as they have in the past) tell me it's application specific and to consult Oracle CM support. Neither support group seems to be able to support Oracle's products. (Dear Oracle, please get your act together. You own both products and should be embarrassed by the lack of customer service here.)
Three, figure out why IE is failing to match up the 2007+ file types with the file content. We're assuming a recent patch did this, but haven't identified which one. In any event, we will probably not be allowed to roll back a security patch to fix this.
Anyway, I hope this helps you. I have a case open currently, as well as another post in the forums.
Lowell