software, windows

Annoying Word 2007 problem: can’t select text

368 Comments

I run Word 2007 on Vista. Today I hit a curious problem. Word opened, but something was badly wrong. I could not select text with the mouse. The document scroll bar did not work. Word crashed on exit. And going into Options – Addins, I could not navigate beyond the “Popular” section.

After several crashes an Office Diagnostics wizard popped up and offered to help. Kind of it. It chugged through numerous tests and finally told me it could not see anything wrong. Never mind.

Checking the newgroups, I found fellow-sufferers but no solution. I decided to be methodical. I started Word in safe mode. (winword /a). It worked. Probably an add-in. I went to the COM add-ins and tried to disable them. Message: “The connected state of Office add-ins registered in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE cannot be changed”. OK, registry then. Navigated to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins

Found three add-ins listed. I changed the value of the LoadBehavior key from 3 to 0 for each add-in.

Word now worked OK, but still crashed on closing. I found I could restore two of the add-ins without problems. The guilty party: OfficePrintAddIn, a component of Flash Paper.

I had a look at active templates. There was one called FlashPaperWordUITemplate.2302.dot. If I tried to unload it, Word crashed. Perhaps it needs the related COM add-in to be loaded. I closed Word, found the template file, and deleted it. Everything is fine now.

A quicker route might be to uninstall Macromedia Flash Paper, unless you use this of course.

I’m still puzzled about why this problem only showed up today. I’d not made any changes to Flash Paper or Word that I’m aware of. And I don’t blame Macromedia (now Adobe) for this; Word 2007 did not exist when this Flash add-in was released.

Posted in the hope that it saves someone else some time.

 

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368 thoughts on “Annoying Word 2007 problem: can’t select text”

  1. Hi everyone!

    I’ve been driving myself crazy over this problem for a couple weeks now. I finally decided to re-install Office completely. Of course that didn’t work.

    But deleting the word data registry key fixed it perfectly (check out Mark’s comment – #24).

    Take care,
    Andrew

  2. Note #7 solved the problem for me, I just renamed the ‘data’ folder ‘ data2.’ Everything seems to be working just fine now. Here are the instructions from Bence Arendas, #7:
    Close Word and Outlook
    2. Start / Run and type regedit
    3. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice12.0WordData
    4. Rename this key.
    5. Restart Word

  3. THANK YOU SO MUCH! I have been everywhere looking for this fix. I managed to remove the SnagIt addin from Word and all my problems were over. I found this, which helped:
    —
    To disable SnagIt 8 (and some versions of 7), close out of all open programs and go to “Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs”, click once on SnagIt from the list of installed programs, and click on the Change button. In the SnagIt Setup box, click Modify, then choose Next. Click the down arrow next to the Word add-in and choose Entire feature will be unavailable. This should remove the SnagIt addin from Word.
    —
    Hope this helps someone.

  4. Hi Sam,
    Thank you and everyone else in this thread, as this solution worked for me too. I’ve been hitting my head up against the wall (2nd time this has happened!) and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t select text, etc. I re-installed, too, but the only fix is to rename the folder as you stated.

    Glad it worked – but it makes me a dubious MSFT Office 2007 user.

  5. Tim, thank you so much for posting your fix…you should be sent presents and run for your public office. This problem drove me crazy for the last 5 days.

    The fix worked great!

  6. Thanks,
    It took me two days to find this blog – but deleting the data key in the registry fixed my word mouse problems and my crash when shutting down. Vista – Office 2007 – Adobe CS3

  10. I had the same problem. Vista + word2007. By deleting the word data key I could solve the Problem. Thanks !

    Wilfried aus Weingarten, Germany

  13. I second all of you guys – absolutely brialliant. Just when I thought I was going crazy….you all found the solution. Kudos.

  14. Word 2007 running on Vista was crashing upon exit and I was unable to highlight text. This occured after installing Adobe Acrobat 8.0 as part of the Adobe Creative Suite 3.

    The highlighting text problem was resolved by disabling the plugins – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftOfficeWordAddins and the crashing upon exit by deleting the data file – HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice12.0WordData

    Thank you so much…

  15. My husband was having this problem on his machine at work and it was driving him nuts. I tried this solution and it worked! Thank you!!!

  16. Here is what I did
    1) Go to your control pannel
    2) Uninstall or change a programe
    3) view installed updates
    4) Remove the last security update

    Word should work after that that last security has the error

  17. I had the same VERY annoying problem with Word 2007 navigation bars not functioning and select not working either. I found a working solution in the MS KB. The solution is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541

    The nature of the solution is to delete the MS Word “DATA” registry entry that apparently (too easily) gets corrupted.

  18. Thank you for figuring out the fix for this problem, I was going nuts with it. I had to uninstall Flash Paper, which is fine cause I didn’t use it at all.

  19. Very helpful

    i had a problem with the live meeting template and would crash even on the removal, had to change the normal template to a temp one and save it and then re-do and then remove and put back to get it to work

  20. Thanks Tim and Bence! #7 That surely kept my number one end user (my husband)happy when I applied the regedit solution. I didn’t need to uninstall any add-ins.

  21. Tim and Bence,

    Thanks! The regedit trick worked. It eliminated both the mouse problems and the crash on close problems.

    I find it interesting that the KB article was not at the top of the Google search.

    Thanks
    Jim

  22. Two comments (a) thanks to Tim for decent SEO – my “Word 2007 crashing” search yielded his site and (b) thanks to Bence for the solution.

    My symtoms were very similar -except an additional one which was when opening a docuement by clicking on the doc, Word would load but the document wouldn’t load – then it would crash as described here.

    thanks all,

  23. Hi:
    I just got a Vista laptop with Word 2007 … everytime I start Word, within 30 secs – 1 minute the program says it has encountered an error and the program needs to shut down.

    Any suggestions? I read through this thread, but couldn’t figure out if any of the solutions presented applied specifically to my problem.

    Sam

  24. I just got a Vista laptop with Word 2007 … everytime I start Word, within 30 secs – 1 minute the program says it has encountered an error and the program needs to shut down.

    You are probably better off asking in a Word newsgroup or taking this up with your supplier.

    That said, there are two things you should try. First, try running in safe mode. To do this, hold down the control key when starting Word, and accept the offer of safe mode. Is Word stable? If so, there is probably an add-in you need to disable.

    Second, try renaming normal.dot. This resets a number of options and can fix problems. See here:

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822005

    Tim

  25. Thanks for this! If it helps anyone – I had to ‘Run winword.exe as Administrator’ in order to actually access the Trust Center tab of Word options.

    Once I disabled plug-ins my mouse came back.

    Thx!

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