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. Thank you, thank you!

    That just saved me days of pain and suffering.

    In my case it is Word 2003 on Vista, and Flash was the culprit. I’m afraid Adobe products may be about to join the “don’t install” list next to the Quicktime virus…

  7. Thank you for the great posts and helpful advice. Your solution of editing the Registry worked perfect.

    Eric

  8. I did what Bence said, too, and it worked. Cursor works and Word doesn’t crash on closing. Thanks, Bence!

  9. Yep, worked great. to fix it on Vista. Probably related to recent Adobe install. Thank you all for walking me through this!

  11. Thanks for all of this. I hope it works for me.

    Am I old school to think that no one should have to do this much work on software they paid for and have owned for less than a year? 90 days of service and impossible to navigate forums are poor customer service in my opinion. Too bad this software is the standard everywhere.

  12. hi people.
    My problem arises in using Excel 2007, nome works scrooll mouse, apply a solution similar to my case. Thank you for your collaboration

  13. Thanks to everyone. I have tried literally all the suggestions here, singly and in combination. It turns out I had the same mouse symptom you all had/have but the cause was a conflicting program, not a registry entry, template, or the like. The cure certainly wasn’t reinstalling Office (as most everyone here has discovered).

    My hint that the problem lay elsewhere was that Word 2007 had the same problem in safe mode as it did in regular mode. That did not seem to match others’ experiences here. So, I began a different approach. I systematically deleted startup programs, services, and processes.

    The conflicting program turned out to be Synergy(http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/). This is a wonderful program that allows one to share a screen, mouse, and keyboard between multiple computers over a LAN.

    Word and Synergy were cohabiting politely until about a month ago. That makes me suspect an update to Windows or DirectX. I have spent enough hours pulling my hair out that I will probably never discover what system change caused the conflict. My workaround is to turn off Synergy when I use Word. This is only a minor annoyance.

    I hope my discovery of the Synergy/Word interaction helps at least one other person.

    Thanks again for a systematic approach to solving this problem.

  16. It also happens that the screen grabber software, SnagIt, has something in its office addin that makes for the same malfunction. Disabling it in the registry in the same way as above fixes word.

  18. Thank you!!!!!!

    For me (also on Vista) . . . a client sent me several Word docs. Finally after reinstalling Word and troubleshooting everything I could think of etc etc etc etc I started with winword /a and that solved it. It appears that (when I opened this way) that the client’s Word docs contained macros that Vista in its infinite wisdom wanted to protect me from; hence my inability to make a single edit to the doc. I understand that the issue occurs on XP but I have had NOTHING but glitches with Vista since installing it.

    Thank you for this information.
    Judy

  19. Thank you Tim and Bence! Bence’s fix worked for me also. As with most here, the built in diagnostics are utterly useless.

    Thanks again!

  22. Thanks mate. I had given up on Word 2007 until I found this.

    Why didn’t MS ever solve this issue?

    Guess MS is turning into utility provider when it comes to Windows and Office.

    Moving to Linux and OpenOffice soon.

  24. I had the same problem with the mouse not working on Word and fixed the way Bence suggested.

    Thanks a lot!
    I feel much better now

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