The "Help" function doesn't work

I'm running WIndows ME. I had to do a reinstall. Since then, I can't get "Help" to run in any programs. Help and Support for Windows works but if I select Help in any other program like Word or Excel etc, just a blank window comes up.

I swear I had this problem before, long ago, and I downloaded a fix from Microsoft. I just spent over three hours searching the MS site and using every search engine I can think of and I can't for the life of me find that fix.

Any ideas?

Thanks In Advance

Pete

 

Can't help with the patch but have you tried doing a repair of Office?

Open 'Word', go to Help/Detect & repair.

 

When you select Help, on the toolbar, the menu does not appear?

Or when you select Help, then another item, from the pull down menu?

Which item are you trying to bring up?

Any programs as in, notepad also?

 

Hipster Doofus: I did a repair of Office, didn't help

theefool:
I select help then the first item (like Contents and Index).
When I click on Contents and Index, I get an hourglass for maybe one second then it is like I never clicked Help. It does it in IE6, Office programs, other third party stuff (AVRStudio). Other lower down menu items seem to work. Like, "About"

I just tried it with notepad (great suggestion) and I got:
"Can't open file mk@MSITStore"
I googled that and Microsoft told me to download htmlhelp.exe which tried to installed "HTML Help Workshop 1.3" but that failed because, "This computer already has a newer version of HTML Help".

Hmmmmm

Pete

 

Try this instead: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;312456

Ignore the 98(se) references....

 

Another possible answer, given to me by Matacumbie
: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892675

 

Thanks theefool. I had already tried the first link. I ran into a bunch of problems, like I'm running IE6 from a download not from a CD. Also the line,"regsvr c:\windows\system\hhctrl.ocx" doesn't run because "regsvr" doesn't exist. I think ME may use a different program to register. I sort of gave up on that "solution". I may have to revisit it.

I am heading out of town for a week to ten days and won't be able to get back to it until later. I'll post may results then.

Thanks for the help,

Pete

 

Re: The "Help" function doesn't work **Solved**

I got it working. Just in case someone else has this problem, here is what I did:

Well, actually theefool had the answer when he directed me to:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;312456

It took a little thrashing around to be able to follow the instructions on that page (here after referred to as "the page").

The instructions say to extract hhctrl.ocx from the Internet Explorer CD. Well, I was running IE6.0 that I had downloaded so I didn't have any CD. In addition, the page says to run "regsvr c:\windows\system\hhctrl.ocx". Well, regsvr doesn't exist on my computer.

So I uninstalled IE6.0 which took me back to IE5.0 but left a newer version of hhctrl.ocx in my system directory. The version I had was 5.2.3790.309 while the page says IE5.0 uses 4.73.8412

I then used the link on the page that tells me how to extract from the CD but that doesn't work because hhctrl is a system file and can't be changed. Delete it, rename it, what ever, version 5.2.3790.309 comes back to life like a zombie.

I found a page on the microsoft web site that instructs how to overwrite these files using safe mode but I don't have support for my CD drive in safe mode. So, using the basic instructions for extracting a file I extracted it to the desktop. I then started in safe mode and moved the file to the system directory.

To register it, I found that I have regsvr32 so I used that to register hhctrl.oxc. That is, I did RUN, regsvr32 c:\windows\system\hhctrl.ocx.

Now I have "Help" back.

Thanks Everyone

I hope this helps someone.

PeteJC