[Avalanche]

Hi, I searched through the forums and I couldn't see anything directly pertaining to my situation, so I thought I'd bite the bullet and ask the question.

In any Office 2000 application, Word, Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint, etc, I cannot open the help files, either by way of the office assistant, or directly through the help menu. It sits for a while as if it is loading something, but then nothing ever happens.

I have not intstalled service release 1 for Office 2000 cause it causes very bad things to my install of Office. And no, it's not because I have a "pirated" copy of Office, I don't know why it screws things up, it just does. I've never needed SR1 anyway, cause as far as my system has been concerned Office 2000 right out of the box has been fine.

I've tried repairing the install of Office and reinstalling it, but the issue stays.

My system an software specs are as follows:

Windows 2000 Pro sp2

Office 2000 Academic Release (I think this was the same as Professional, but I'm not sure, I can't remember, as I don't have the box in front of me, and I'd have to go searching for it to find out :))

Athlon 1.2Ghz on KT133A mobo w/ 4.32 4 in 1's installed
384Mb PC-133 RAM

I'm not sure what else might be needed to troubleshoot this one.

Anyway, I'd appreciate any thoughts or insights you fine forum members might have on this subject, it sure is perplexing to me.

[Avalanche]

Thanks for the ideas, but no.

Alas, it makes no difference whether I have the CD in the drive or not. Also I have not changed the letter designation for the cdrom drive.

I cannot honestly say whether or not I chose to install the help files to the hard drive, all I ever do is choose the default install for both disc one and two. But I think they are set to run from hard drive automatically aren't they?

Still perplexed.

[Avalanche]

Jeeze, no luck!

I tried every one of your ideas, including the registry repair tool AND the Repair function from within the setup program, and the problem is still there.

I checked to make sure the help files were installed onto the hard drive, but that didn't fix it either.

I can't figure it out, there is no reason why this would happen, I don't even get an error message that could help me figure out the problem.

Thanks a lot for your help though.

[Avalanche]

So I did a little hard drive search, and found all the help files are in a folder called "1033" under "C:\Program Files\microsoft office\Office\"

They are all there, various names, the one for Outlook 2000 is called "OUTLHLP9.CHM". If I double click directly on the help file it opens up just fine, showing me all the help topics for the program that it is for.

Now since these files are in the right place, and obviously not corrupted, shouldn't they work from within the program?

This is a strange one. I'd really like to fix this, since I'm in need of both the Outlook and Excel help files, and double clicking on them from the install directory doesn't give me any options for searching them like using them from within the programs.

So any ideas now? I'm as perplexed as ever.

[Avalanche]

Yeah, I did an uninstall and reinstall, and I even did some registry hacks.

There is a help topic specifically about this issue on the Microsoft web site, the URL is:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q237/3/55.ASP?LN=EN-CA&SD=gn&FR=0

I did everything that the help topic suggested and none of it worked.

I can't think of anything else to try, but it sounds from readin that help page that it might have something to do with IE5.5sp2, so maybe I should try update IE to version 6???

I just don't know.

[Avalanche]

Well that's enough. I installed IE6, something I have been avoiding, cause I had terrible experiences with the public beta.

It made no difference, still no help. I guess I'm stuck with browsing the help files manually from the "1033" directory. That is absolutely dumb.

PS, I also installed all the updates to Office 2000, and they broke the install, ie, no Office application would run, just like the last time I did it. I don't know why, cause I assure you I don't have a priated copy of Office, but the patches act as though I do.

Personally I think I'm gonna give up, I've reinstalled Office from the CD, and I'm leaving it the way it is, everything else works, except the help, and I guess I can find those manually anyway.

Thank you very much for your help.