I have Office 2003 Professional and never encountered that with Word.  Before you uninstall/reinstall, try the Detect and Repair procedure (in the Help dropdown menu).

But, it may not be a Word problem, but the clipboard or your interent browser.  Are you using I.E. or some other browser?  If you are not using I.E., try it with I.E. and see if you have the problem.  If it is I.E., update to the latest V8 if you don't have that now.

Hi fireberd,

Thank you for the suggestion. I just used the Detect & Repair feature. We'll see if that takes care of the problem.

I use Firefox rather than IE.

The Clipboard I mentioned is actually a feature of Word. Because I copy the same or similar text a lot, I use the Clipboard so I can have that text available to me in Word.

I will let you know if the Detect/Repair feature worked.

Thanks again!

E

So far so good.

I noted that the first time I tried to copy something, I could see visible in the Clipboard window a copy of the Internet page that I performed the copy from, as well as a second entry with just the language I was copying.

Before doing the Detect/Repair function, the Internet page would copy over and over, making it impossible for me to do anything else. This time, the Internet page copied only once, and I was able to delete it from the Clipboard window, and keep working.

Best,

E

So far, it sounds like the Detect and Repair fixed it and you won't have to completely reinstall office. 

Thanks for the feedback.

Unfortunately, the problem has recurred.

This time, the Office Clipboard did not copy the web page over and over, but it would not let me paste anything into Word other than the image of the web page where I last performed the copy function.

So I guess I am back to square one. If anyone has other suggestions about what may be causing this issue with the Office Word 2003 clipboard, and what to do about it, I would appreciate your feedback.

Thanks.

---An Update:--

I again tried the Repair/Detect function, but the problem recurred with a vengeance when I next restarted Word. When I open Clipboard in Word, and try to copy something (this time a phrase already in my Word doc), Clipboard repeatedly copies a screen shot of the screen wherre the language was. When this happens, I cannot do anything else in the Word doc.

I have looked on Word 2003 Microsoft support site and have not been able to find anything on this. To get help from Microsoft I would have to pay at least $50 for 24-hour email help.

Hi Ron,

Thanks so much for the suggestion. Pardon my ignorance, but what is the Normal.dot file, and why do you believe that deleting it will fix this Clipboard problem I am having?

Many thanks for your time,

Edie

Exit Word and then search the hard drive for normal.dot. Include hidden and system files in your search. Delete all copies of normal.dot that you find. Next time you launch Word, it'll create a new copy of normal.dot. See if that solves the problem.

Of course, if you've made lots of personalized changes to the normal.dot template, they'll all be lost and you'll be back to a generic template which you'll have to customize again.

If you do make lots of personal changes to the normal template, be sure to save an extra copy of normal.dot with a different file name or on external media. I call my backup "normal.new". So when normal.dot gets corrupted again -and it will- I just delete the old version and make a copy of normal.new with the file name normal.dot. Takes a few seconds and I'm back to work.

Hope this helps.

Ron

Normal.dot is the template that contains all the settings used by Word when you open a new (blank) document. It sets the default font, margins, tab spacing, toolbars etc etc. So every blank doc you start opens with exactly the same format.

For whatever reasons, normal.dot gets corrupted fairly frequently (thank you Microsoft!). Though you may not notice obvious signs of corruption when you open a blank doc, strange and mysterious things start to happen and some functions may not work, or not work correctly.  If copy/paste work correctly elsewhere, aside from Word,  that's a reasonable sign that normal.dot is corrupted.

So the first thing to do when Word acts up is to delete normal.dot. I can't promise this will fix your specific problem, but it's a simple and harmless thing to try. The only thing you have to remember is to delete all copies of normal.dot on your hard drive. If Word finds any existing copy (corrupted or not) it will use it and the problem won't go away. If it doesn't find normal.dot, it will automatically create a new copy with all the default settings that are built into Word.

Ron

Hi Ron,

Thanks so much for explaining. Yes, thank you Microsoft, to say it nicely! Can't live with them, can't live without them (unfortunately).

I will definitely try this, and hope that it takes care of both the copying issue, and an issue I have begun having with the spell-checker, where the option to correct a misspelled word is mysteriously grayed out and is therefore unavailable.

Best regards and thanks again,

Edie

Edie,

You're quite welcome. Please post back and let us know if deleting normal.dot fixes the problem.

Ron