I will also post this in one of the IE groups, but I haven't set that up yet
(and various Google searches have been unrewarding).

I can rarely access Office Help (in any of the Office programs, including
Excel).

What usually happens is that Help returns a screen:

This page is unavailable
The page you are looking for is unavailable. Try the following:
Click Refresh on the toolbar
Click Back on the toolbar, and then click the link to the page again
Show offline content from this computer.


However, the Table of Contents will download; the icon at the bottom right
shows "Connected to Office Online"

If I click on a Table of Contents item, the word "downloading" will appear as
the index item "expands", but the main screen on the right still shows the
above message.

In addition, even if I select to "show offline content", the "This Page is
unavailable" message persists.

The only other abnormality I have found is that if I select View Source from an
Internet Explorer page, nothing happens.

I have set my IE security and privacy settings to default. I have cleared the
temporary Internet and browsing history files (this seemed to help for two or
three accesses, but then things started acting up again). And I have even made
IE my default browser.

There do not seem to be any contemporaneous events in Event Viewer.

If I do a "clean boot", using msconfig to disable everything except Microsoft
Services, I get the same results.

However, if I boot into Safe mode (with networking), the behavior of both the
Office Help system, and the "View Source" in IE appears normal.

Today I went to the MS update site and downloaded all the relevant updates I
could find (and I do download system updates as a matter of course).

I have run Office Diagnostics with no problems found.

I have Windows XP Prof SP3
IE8
Office 2007

Any thoughts?

Thanks
--ron