Dell inspiron questions

Hello,
Our church just bought a Dell Inspiron laptop. It seems to be working fine except yesterday I noticed that it is not recognizing the icon for standard MS-Office programs. It is turning the icons into the tradition "generic" window icon with the blue title bar. The files still load correctly. This is very strange. I have never seen this happen before. I know how to associate file types with a program; I checked that out in the Defaults after clicking the START button. They are already correctly associated. I attempted to change the icon but don't see a way to do that. Why are these icons losing their "signature" look? I would like them back! As I said, the programs still load these files correctly. So far there are two files affected: one is an .mdb (we have to save it this way for sharing purposes); the other is a Word, .docx file.