Taskbar Jumplist anomalies for Word 2010 and Excel 2010

Question

I am having problems with missing jumplists for Office 2010 products (Word and Excel) pinned on the Windows 7 taskbar, **BUT** have no problems with jumplists for Notepad and IE pinned on the taskbar.
Observation 1: I just upgraded from Office 2010 Starter to full Office 2010 by getting a product key. Full Office 2010 was installed on my laptop when I purchased it but only Starter was licensed. Full Office 2010 was unusable until the upgrade. I suspect
the leapfrog from Starter to full Office 2010 might have a part in this jumplist issue.
Observation 2: I can see from a DOS prompt that the AutomaticDestinations and CustomDestinations folders exist under Recent. However, from Windows Explorer I cannot see the 2 folders under Recent. (That may be a clue…if other people CAN see the 2 folders
from Windows Explorer.)
Observation 3: In DOS, I can see that both directories have files ending in -ms. I can also see updates (new files with fresh timestamps) from opening Word and Excel files in those 2 directories. It’s almost like Word and Excel don’t understand to go look
in those 2 directories after the Office upgrade, even though Windows 7 (?) generates the -ms files for the jumplist function.
Observation 4: Again, no problems with Notepad and IE jumplists. I can remove the files from the AutomaticDestinations folder and cause Notepad to have no jumplist items, and then restore them and Notepad has jumplist contents again.
Observation 5:  I had no problem using jumplists with Word Starter and Excel Starter.  All references to Office/Word/Excel Starter are now gone from the Starter button and All Programs - sent to Recycle bin.  I deleted the Word Starter
and Excel Starter entries when I upgraded, but I just deleted the Microsoft Office Starter (Englisgh) entry under All Programs today...I thought it was a benign entry and wouldn't hurt since I wasn't using it.  Maybe there's some corruption in registry
as a result of the mixture.  Interestingly, I can drag a file created in Word Starter to the taskbar and it will try to pin it to the Word Starter taskbar "ghost" that's in the Recycle bin.
Any clues anyone?  I have no large files in the two destination folders, and have only about 20 files total in each folder...far fewer than the 999 threshhold mentioned in one of the updates for Office 2010.
Thank you!

Answer 1

I encountered exactly the same problem, and under exactly the same circumstances as the original poster (upgraded from Office Starter to Home and Business; jump lists worked fine in Starter, then stopped working for Excel and Word after upgrading). 
Like the original poster, none of the various fixes found online corrected the problem, nor did re-installing Office.
I also tried what was suggested by Max Meng and created a new User Account. The problem occurred for the new account, just as it did with the old one.
After about 6 hours of fighting, I have finally solved the problem.  The solution is not easy, fast or pretty.
What I did was uninstall Office (again) using the Control Panel. Then I ran a FixIt utility found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301 (method 2)
My hope was that this would do additional registry clean-up.  I knew from earlier attempts that this alone would not fix the problem, though.
Despite uninstalling twice, there were still a lot of references left in the registry to "Word Starter" and "Excel Starter".  Likewise, there were still references to "WINWORDC.EXE" and "EXCELC.EXE", which are the starter versions of the executables.
So I went through the registry using RegEdit, and manually deleted every key which included those strings.  The largest number of cases were file type definitions for various Word and Excel file extensions.  When in doubt, I deleted entire tag
hierarchies for Word and Office file types, figuring that they would be restored when I reinstalled Office.  In the process, I removed pretty much every reference to Word or Excel that I could find in the registry.
I also deleted any directory on my hard drive (in c:\Program Files(x86), c:\Program Data, and c:\Users\<name>\AppData which appeared to be related to Office.
Having done this, I reinstalled again, and the jump lists for Word and Excel now work.
In debugging the problem, I found that .automaticDestination-ms files (which contain the data behind the jump lists) were not being created when I opened Word or Excel documents; they *were* being created when I manually pinned individual files to the
taskbar, however. 
I suspect that this might be due to the long hexadecimal filename being based on a hash of the application name, or what the system thinks is the application name based on the file type.  Removing the references to "Word Starter" and "Excel Starter",
and the corresponding WINWORDC.EXE and EXCELC.EXE in the registry might have cleared up this problem.
Obviously this fix is potentially risky, and should only be attempted if you are comfortable editing the registry. Making a full system backup beforehand would be a wise precaution.  For this specific case, however (broken jump lists after
upgrading from Starter to full Office) it would appear the only alternative is a clean install of Windows (to wipe the registry completely).