MS Office 2003: Help Window blank!

[Hopk1ns]

Hi,

I have a rather strange problem that manifests itself in a few applications that seems to suggest that an underlying Windows XP resource is broken. The most "common" application that I have found this affecting is the Office 2003 help pane, which I will describe now.

You're in an Office app, let's say Word. Hit F1 to call up the help pane. Search for "Format", and it tries to go online. Change the menu at the bottom from "Microsoft Office Online" to "Offline Help" and search again. Then click the hyperlink to the first search result (which should be "Format field results" in this case). Up pops a new window called "Microsoft Office Word Help" that *should* contain the help text. However, in my case, a window pops up with the expected title and also the Back, Forwards and Print buttons at the top, but then the rest of the window is blank (white). There is no right-click menu in this window.

This behaviour happens in a couple of third party apps that I use - Allway Sync and the eMusic downloader. Unfortauntely, in these apps part of the GUI itself doesn't render, so I can't actually use the program. This leads me to believe that some XP resource is broken which these applications, and Office help, call on.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I cannot locate any similar problems in this or other forums.

Thanks in advance.

[Hopk1ns]

Just to conclude this, in case anyone else finds this thread, the problem was a broken install of IE7. Reinstalling IE7 solved this problem.