I also have Office Word and Excel Starter and got this problem after doing Windows updates. I got round it as follows:
Find a Excel spreadseet file or a Word document
RIGHT click on it an you get a menu
Select "Open with"
You see "Microsoft Application Virtualization DDE Launcher".
Select this, then at the bottom make sure the option "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file" has a tick against it.
Then click OK.
Now the icon should change back to an Excel or Word icon and the file should open OK.