Spell Checking not working in Office 2007 (Vista)
I have just installed Office 2007. This was not at all straight forward. First the installer crashed leaving my system in a mess. This appears to have been due to an updated Normal .dot file. My first piece of advice is to perform an uninstall of old versions of Office before installing Office 2007. However, once I did get it working – after a full Vision rollback to a snapshot which I had the good sense to take before installing Office – I discovered that the spell checking didn’t work – none of those little red wavy lines came up on a badly spelled word. Other symptoms included Office saying that it could not find the English(UK) dictionary and that the proofing tools were not installed properly. After a few more tests it turned out that spell checking worked for other users but not for me (the installer). After another few fruitless roll backs and reinstallations I have discovered the problem and offer it up in the hope that other poor souls can be avoided pain – if this is you go and give a fiver to Oxfam.
The problem lies with the registry.
There is a registry key called:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Proofing Tools\1.0\Override\en-US
(hey it works for Americans)
This controls the override of the so called (default) US English Spell checking.
Under this key are a few registry entries such as DLL and LEX.
However, if you delete the whole registry entry above along with its children everything will work properly.
I hope this helps someone else.
al
8/2/08