A few days ago, shortly after replacing the hard drive in my notebook (upgraded to 200gig at 7200 RPM, woohoo!) Word 2007 no longer worked well for me. The first symptom I noticed was that when I clicked on the X in the upper right of the window to close the app, it would crash instead of closing. Word would then restart, which was kind of not what I wanted.
The next symptom I noticed a few minutes later was that if Word was in the background, I couldn’t use the mouse to bring it to the foreground if I clicked in the body of Word. Clicking on the window frame, the menu bar or the toolbars would bring Word to the foreground. Weird.
The real kicker was that I could no longer select any text in the Word document. Unfortunately this problem fully manifested itself when I was trying to put together a rush quote for a prospect (of course).
Since this all occurred shortly after replacing the hard drive I thought that perhaps that might have had something to do with it. After all, troubleshooting 101 is "what did you change last?". It’s when we say "nothing!", while ignoring the major replacement we just did that we run into major problems.
So, step 1 was to do a repair on Office 2007. After that was completed, the behavior was the same.
Step 2 was to uninstall and reinstall Office 2007. After that was completed, the behavior was the same.
Step 3 was to go to the MS newsgroups for Word and start reading. It turns out that a recent update was causing the problem! Following the instructions to delete a couple of registry keys solved the problem right away. Good to know. <sigh> I lost about 3 hours of time to this stupid problem.
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