If you are like me and you became dependant upon the New Office Document and Open Office Document icons on the start menu in Office 2000 and previous versions of Office running on Windows XP or previous versions of Windows here's a tip for you.
You probably already know that in Office 2003 and up these icons are not installed by default but you can add them by doing a custom installation of Office. You probably also know that setting the start menu to classic in Vista puts these icons back where we like them.
Now comes Windows 7 which has no classic start menu. We can pin items to the start menu in Windows 7 and we can install these icons using a custom office install but for whatever reason these two icons will not pin to the start menu.
Now for the fix.... Create two shortcuts pointing to osa.exe in your <Microsoft Office\Office12> folder, with parameter -n for "New Office Document" and -f for "Open Office document". You can now pin these custom created icons to the start menu. Next if you want the icons to look like the correct icons just select them by going to properties on your new shortcuts, the icons are in osa.exe.
More info can be found here. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290144
Note: This procedure does not work for Office 2010. osa.exe was removed from Office 2010.