Help Script Errors (Office 2003)

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Have just installed Office 2003 on a new XP Pro SP2 PC. Word, Excel and Outlook all work fine except for the Help system. If I try to display the Help for ANY of these products, I receive the initial Table of Contents and can drill down this normally. If I click on a specific Help item I receive a Script Error but clicking OK usually then displays the initial Help panel. However, clicking on any further selection in the Help panel immediately generates another Script Error and I can display no further. The Script Errors usually say something like “Expected Identifier” or “Object Expected”.

I have tried a Repair and a Re-install to no avail. XP SP2 and Office 2003 patched to date.

Any ideas please?

Thanks, Rob

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There’s nothing you can do about the script errors, so it’s best to suppress the error messages. This is done in Internet Explorer (since Office uses HTML help):

1. Start Internet Explorer.
2. Select Tools | Internet Options…
3. Activate the Advanced tab.
4. Check the ‘Disable script debugging’ check box.
5. Clear the ‘Display a notification about every script error’ check box.
6. Click OK.

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Thanks for the quick response.

Those are already my settings for IE:

Disable Script Debugging (IE) is checked
Disable Script Debugging (other) is checked
Display a notification about every script error is unchecked

For example in Word, I click the Help Table of Contents, I click Working with Text, Copy and Paste, Move or copy text or graphics and I receive the IE Script Error “Expected Identifier”. Clicking OK then displays the move or copy text and graphics Help panel with a list of 5 selections for more info. Clicking any of them brings up the IE Script Error message “Object Expected” but clicking OK displays nothing further.

Thus I am effectively unable to use the Help system!

IE appears to working normally in terms of being able to surf web pages normally without errors and the IE Help Menu itself for IE works perfectly.

Rob

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See if the reply by Frank Saunders in this newsgroup thread helps.

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Thanks Hans, Help is working properly now.

I worked down the list from the link you gave me. Refreshing the scripting engine (1) did not cure the problem after restarting, but then after running the two Regsvr32 commands for the vbscript.dll and jscript.dll (2a and 2b) these cured the problem and the Help is now working fine.

Thanks again for your help
Rob

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