Even though Office 2010 has since been released I recently upgraded a client’s workstation from Microsoft’s Office 2003 to Office 2007. The upgrade installed without a hitch, including the service pack 2 update, but after a few days the client noticed the Spell Check feature of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and even Outlook was not working.
Through a little google’ing I found several articles mentioning a specific Registry entry that was the culprit. These articles and forum posts where saying to delete an entire key from the HKCU registry hive. Interestingly enough, I delete this key and the spell check feature still doesn’t work. To make a long story short, I found that the entire key cannot be deleted, but rather only two values within the key. So here is the fix that worked for me:
- Click “Start” > “Run” > “regedit” > click “OK”
- Browse to: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Proofing Tools\1.0\Override\en-US
- Delete the “DLL” and “LEX” values pointing to non-existing files
- Restart any open Office applications
You can also merge the following .REG file, which will also delete the two above mentioned values:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Proofing Tools\1.0\Override\en-US]
"DLL"=-
"LEX"=-
I hope this post saves you several hours of troubleshooting this specific issue. Feel free to post any comments.
Justin