Not being able to use your mouse when writing a document in word makes life shall we say - difficult. Tonight, I had this happen. My keyboard worked fine, however the mouse simply wasn’t playing. I could select the menu items but if I tried to select anything within the document, it would simply ignore me. This made was not good!

After uninstalling a recent Windows Update (did nothing). I tried running the Office 2007 Diagnostic which reported everything as fine (it really wasn’t). I turned to a repair of the installation which also did nothing.

After a bit of searching, turns out you can start Word in safe mode my holding down control when you start the application. At this point I could use my mouse again. After a bit more searching, I came across this article - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541. This suggests deleting the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data.

After doing this, Word recreated the key and everything was working again. I can now continue…

Labels: Bad Software