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A solution, at last!
A couple of weeks ago I posted about a problem I was having with Word 2007, where I couldn't use the mouse to move the cursor or select text within the document, even thought the menus themselves worked.
After several hours of trawling various forums, it seemed likely that it was being caused by a Word add-in, most likely an Adobe one, most likely Flash. Unfortunately, I discovered that another symptom of this problem was an inability to navigate past the default tab in the Word Options menu, which of course, is where you can disable the add-ins!
I found lots of people who knew what the problem was, but very few who'd actually managed to fix it/had posted when they'd fixed it. Finally, after reinstalling Office four times between trying various things, including a registry cleaner that had worked for someone else, I happened upon a post by an individual known only as 'c-squared-co' to whom I owe a good deal of gratitude. His solution was to delete the Word Data registry key, which is safe to do because Word rebuilds it every time it start up, and if it's deleted, it rebuilds it with factory settings thus circumventing the issue.
There's no saying that it won't happen again, but at least I'll know the fix next time. I'm posting about it because it's apparently not limited to Word 2007 or even 2003, and there's no sign that Microsoft have an inclination to fix the problem because it's a result of third party software. It was one of the most baffling computer problems I've come across, so I thought if there's any chance I can stop others spending hours and hours of their time in an unpleasantly baffled state, I want to do that!
So here is the forum on which I found the solution.
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patriotjackie, I saw mentions of your problem, too, while I was reading about this, and the same solution may work for you.
ETA: I should add that I bought the licence key yesterday, so this is unrelated to the problem from my last post!
After several hours of trawling various forums, it seemed likely that it was being caused by a Word add-in, most likely an Adobe one, most likely Flash. Unfortunately, I discovered that another symptom of this problem was an inability to navigate past the default tab in the Word Options menu, which of course, is where you can disable the add-ins!
I found lots of people who knew what the problem was, but very few who'd actually managed to fix it/had posted when they'd fixed it. Finally, after reinstalling Office four times between trying various things, including a registry cleaner that had worked for someone else, I happened upon a post by an individual known only as 'c-squared-co' to whom I owe a good deal of gratitude. His solution was to delete the Word Data registry key, which is safe to do because Word rebuilds it every time it start up, and if it's deleted, it rebuilds it with factory settings thus circumventing the issue.
There's no saying that it won't happen again, but at least I'll know the fix next time. I'm posting about it because it's apparently not limited to Word 2007 or even 2003, and there's no sign that Microsoft have an inclination to fix the problem because it's a result of third party software. It was one of the most baffling computer problems I've come across, so I thought if there's any chance I can stop others spending hours and hours of their time in an unpleasantly baffled state, I want to do that!
So here is the forum on which I found the solution.
patriotjackie, I saw mentions of your problem, too, while I was reading about this, and the same solution may work for you.ETA: I should add that I bought the licence key yesterday, so this is unrelated to the problem from my last post!