Jay,
I am having a similar situation at work and I DO have more specifics. Three
days ago (5/18/05) for the third time my Word's FIND AND REPLACE quit
working. This is at my office. I'm on a good sized network. My OS is
Windows 2000. I'm using Office 2003 (though the same thing exactly happened
to me with the previous version of Office, just a few months ago - twice).
The ap isn't completely failing to launch, but the dialog box is failing to
launch. So, I can search clumsily (though I can't effectively edit what goes
into the window where I type my search string) but to replace is well nigh
impossible. Using edit>find won't work nor will using Ctrl+F. There is no
error message. Norton AV is not installed, but McAfee IS installed.
When an IT tech comes to work on it, FIND AND REPLACE does work when he
tries it using his profile. His fix in the past has been to create a
completely new profile and to copy all files to the new profile - thereby
messing up all sorts of settings, making macros in Excel to not work, making
my automatic backup software to have to be reporgrammed etc. It's sort of
like amputation above the knee to treat a hangnail.
I'd sure like some help, because the "experts" at my office are driving me
nuts!
Patrick