Cannot view or open .contact files (in Opus or Explorer)

My apologies in advance if this problem is inappropriate for the DOpus forum. When I view my .contact files in the DOpus viewer pane on my brand-new just-set-up computer (HP 6305 Pro 64-bit Windows 7 Pro), it displays as a text file, and thus looks like an .xml file. It makes no difference whether I set "Use Plugin" to "Default" or to "ActiveX+Preview+Office+Web" (and "Windows contact" is correctly checked in the Plugin Configuration for "ActiveX+Preview+Office+Web").

It's more than a DOpus problem. After further experimentation, here are some more possible clues.

  1. Windows Explorer can't preview a .contact file either.
  2. I cannot open a .contact file as a contact file either in DOpus or in Windows Explorer.
  3. My contact files behave perfectly normally on my old Notebook (Asus 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium), both in DOpus and Windows Explorer, even when I access a contact file on the PC through my Notebook.
  4. The DOpus screen brought up by FileTypes Editor - - > Contact file - - > Edit - - > File Type are identical on the PC and the notebook.
  5. I investigated the file C:Program Files\Windows Mail\wab.exe associated with .contact files on this screen. On my PC, clicking the file does nothing. On my notebook, clicking the file in DOpus or in Windows Explorer brings up the contacts directory. Has some file association gone wrong on the PC?
  6. The notebook has a directory C:\Program Files\Common Files\System, which contains two files with the interesting names wab32.dll and wab32res.dll. This directory is missing from the PC. I copied the directory over from the notebook to the PC, but it didn't fix the problem, which I had hardly expected because there is probably an installation issue.

If the Contact preview handler doesn't work in Explorer either than it's definitely not an Opus issue.

Sounds like the C:\Program Files\Common Files\System directory was either deleted or never installed in the first place. (Along with some other files, folders or registry settings that the Contact viewer depends on, potentially.) Working out what you need to restore or copy over from another installation may be difficult.

Doing a repair on the Windows installation might fix it, if the problem is that something (e.g. a 'registry cleaner') deleted it.

Or maybe the Windows install was done with certain options not selected, so the components for viewing Contact files were never installed to begin with? (I can't see anything that is obviously tied to it in the relevant control panel, though.)