Dear K2: Issues With Word 2007 and My Mouse

Dear Brian:

I’m having issues with Microsoft Word 2007. When I start Word 2007, everything looks OK, but the mouse won’t select many of the things on the screen (e.g., I can’t use the scroll bar on the right-hand side of the screen, many options won’t work, and some of the toolbar buttons won’t work). When I try to exit Word, Windows tries to recover from a “crash” and automatically restarts – so I can’t ever get completely out of Word.

Help!

Edward in Elkton

Dear Edward:

I’ve had the same issue on my computer. This problem seems to happen to me every month or two, but I work with a lot of add-ins in Word, and it’s possible that some of those are not working well together. The problem is generally related to corruption in Word’s registry settings, which indicate the options that are loaded when you start Word. Here’s how I would try to work with this:

1. Click on the Office Button (upper-left corner) and select Word Options, then select Add-Ins. Disable any add-ins that are not “known good” applications. (This is my first step, and it sometimes works, but not always.)

2. (Advanced Users Only) If step #1 doesn’t work, you will need to close all Office applications (hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, select Start Task Manager, and shut down the WinWord.exe application. You will then need to delete some registry keys as detailed in Microsoft support article #921541. If step #1 doesn’t work, step #2 almost always works for me.

If the steps given in the knowledge base article don’t work, you may need to uninstall and reinstall Microsoft Office 2007.

I trust this will help you get things back up and going smoothly.

Best regards, Brian

Brian Tankersley, CPA.CITP is a CPA, speaker, and consultant based in Knoxville, Tennessee. He teaches continuing education classes with K2 Enterprises, instructs CPA review classes for Becker CPA Review, and blogs about accounting and technology matters on his website at http://blog.bftcpa.com.