I can no longer open documents by double clicking on their desktop shortcut or by opening File Explorer and double clicking on the document itself. If I open LibreOffice 24.8 and select the document, either from the File Explorer that opens or from the pictured recent documents, it opens just fine. Once I open the document in this way, then close it and open another one, the first document does not appear in the list of recent documents in the dropdown list in the second document. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, but that did not help. I ran SFC/Scannow and found no problems. This problem just appeared out of nowhere. I am running Windows 11 Pro 23H2, all updates installed, on an intel i9 MSI GS76 Stealth with 16 cores and 32 GB of memory.
First thing to try: Use right mouse-button and select Open-with from context menu of the icon. Is LibreOffice shown in the list to open the file? If yes, try and look for a checkbox to open this type of files always with LibreOffice.
That did not work either. The right click options of Open and Open with in the context menu did nothing on either the desktop shortcuts or the documents in the Documents folder did nothing.
The problem apparently was that the LibreOffice Maintenance service wasn’t being loaded at startup. The service does not do what the various startup managers I have available on my computer says it does. They all say it is involved in LibreOffice updates. It actually It actually is the LibreOffice Service Manager that properly initializes LibreOffice components. Once I made sure that this was enabled in all four of the programs I have that include startup managers, the shortcuts started working again.