Outlook 2003 - Greyed out toolbar with copy & paste between office

[adamfsl]

Hi. Hope somebody is able to help me; this one is really starting to bug me.

Many of my users are having an issue while composing email messages in Outlook 2003. The emails are composed in HTML format, with Outlook being the default client to compose (not word). If the user copies and pastes text from Word to Outlook or vice versa the system will ‘think’ for a second then the Outlook tool bar will grey out most of the icons (send, save, pint, account, tools etc). The only solution is to end Outlook and restart the program and the email is lost – it does not save to draft.

I have tried various other scenarios and found that this does not happen if the email is composed in Rich Text Format or Plain Text. However neither of these formats are suitable for our use.

So the problem is with the HTML format – and word trying to take over the composing??

Have tried re-installing Office and have the most up-to-date updates and service pack 2 installed. We use Win 2k professional as our OS.

This problem has had me stumped for months now; no amount of google-ing has dug up anything similar…

Regards

Adam