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It must be Wednesday.  My Windows desktop is blissfully clean where three-hundred Firefox windows once were, and Microsoft Word 2007 has gone funky - the mouse doesn't work, except for opening menus.  Yup, it's Wednesday, when Microsoft pushes out its Windows updates.  I've seen this four times now and, though it has been documented elsewhere, I'm composing this blog post - a note to myself, really - so that I may never again need to Google the solution.

To clarify the problem, after a Windows Update, the mouse pointer in Microsoft Word 2007 refuses to select most application controls, including document components, window sliders, and more.  Menu items will function, if only enough to close the application, but then Word throws an application failure message with the option to restart Word and to notify Microsoft of the trouble.  When Word restarts, the problem recurs.  Likewise, restarting the system doesn't remedy the situation.

The solution, it turns out, is to remove (or, more prudently, rename) a particular Windows registry key.  Here's the steps:

1. Close Microsoft Word 2007
2. Launch Windows Registry Editor (regedit.exe)
3. Rename the following registry key to "Data_Backup," for example:
   
   

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data

4. Close Registry Editor

The trouble should be gone.  Launch Microsoft Word 2007 and resume your document-editing goodness.

I hope you find this information helpful.