As you open files in Word 2007, the Office button menu keeps track of them. Listing them in the menu, which allows you to quickly access files you've recently used, modified, or created. It's a handy thing. But what's not handy is when you delete a document and yet it's still reference in the list.

Yes, Word is stupid that way; it doesn't recognize that the file is gone. After all, Word is only storing the filename, not the file itself. Word doesn't go out to disk and check to ensure that all the files it lists in the Office button menu are legitimate or not. (Actually, such a trick would have problems of its own.) So you're left to follow these steps to remove the unwanted file:

Click the Office Button to display the menu.

Click the Word Options button.

The Word Options window appears.

From the left side of the Word Options window, choose Advanced

On the right side of the window, in the Display area, set the number of Recent Documents to zero.

The full command name is "Show this number of Recent Documents." It may say 17 (as it did on my PC) now, or some other number. Change the value to zero.

Click the OK button.

Now check the Office button menu. There should be no files listed. (Yes, the side affect here is that all files will be removed from the list.)

To reset the value back to 17, or whatever value you prefer, repeat these steps.

Yeah, that's pretty much how it works when you want to remove a file.

I've never done this myself. I work on so many documents that eventually the missing document lapses from the list. But if there was one document sitting there, and it bugged me, I'd do these same steps.