Ah, I think I fixed it. I went: Add and Remove Programs - Office 2010 click to run - repair. Seems better. My extensions went back to .doc too. Whew. 
I need to access 20 years of Word documents but today my laptop will no longer open Word Starter 2010. Nothing I try works. It wants me to buy Office 365 etc. How can I get back my work??  My laptop is a 2009 XPS 15 L501x, Win 7 64-bit. Office Starter 2010 is a limited but non-expiring version of Office. It was preinstalled on the laptop but did not include a CoA or anything that I have ever seen. (I still have all my documentation.) The problem may have started after a windows 7 critical update including Microsoft Silverlight. It caused several problems including disabling other programs. I tried right clicking word on the start menu to restore older version but it did not help. Don't know if this matters but I also noted all my old word documents have had their extensions changed from doc to docx, and my pc is identified as an AMD64, its not, its a 1st gen intel i7. ... Any help appreciated, thanks in advance.
Office Starter 2010 "is not compatible"??