Cannot run excel

Hi I have had Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for about a year now and it has been running perfectly. However, just recently I have not been able to run excel. When I try to run it a small window comes up saying it is trying to configure Microsoft office ultimate 2007. I then get an error message 1406: setup cannot write the value contexts to the registry key… I have, of course, already googled this, read all the info on the microsoft web site (which does not, however, refer to excel 2007, and followed various other suggestions I found on the web. Nothing works. Any help would be appreciated.

Typically, this happens when you first try to use a feature that is not installed yet, the 2003/2007 Office program will try to install the feature automatically. Or perhaps maybe downloaded an update to Office ? Are you using a user account (on the Local Machine,) that has 'administrator' rights ? Have you tried the Detect and Repair tool ? (Now called "Diagnostics") xp Click -start-, then click -control panel- when the "control panel" window opens, double-click -add or remove programs- when the "add or remove programs" window opens, wait for it to populate, (30 secs or so,) scroll-down and locate "Microsoft Office [version you have] 2007", then on the right side, click the -change- button click -repair-, then click -continue- or You can also run Diagnostics from the Start-all programs menu in Windows XP and Vista. click -start-, “All Programs”, “Microsoft Office “, “Microsoft Office Tools”, then click -microsoft office diagnostics- Tallon41

Hi Tallon41 Thanks for your reply. While I was waiting for a reply I tried some of the suggestions I found on the internet for this type of problem but nothing worked so in the end I uninstalled Office and re-installed it. I also turned off automatic updates from MS because I thought that the problem would have to be linked to something which came down from Microsoft. Once I had re-installed office, Excel started to work again. The only problem I have now is that there are loads of MS updates for Office waiting to be installed onto my computer. I am a little concerned about installing them as I assume that one of them caused the problem in the first place. Do you have any suggestions about that? Thanks.

Rather than turn-off Auto-updates, set it to "Notify me but do not automatically Download or Install them" Then dbl-click on the yellow shield that will appear in the system tray when updates are "available". choose -custom-, then download them all, but after the download is done. the shild will say they're ready to install. dbl-click it again, and again choose -custom-; this time only install one of them at a time. [any "windows" updates should be OK] If indeed the situation repeats itself, un-install the last office update. This is easily done through the "add or remove programs" control in the control panel. at the top there will be a checkbox to "show updates" this will reveal all "windows" and "office" updates. Select the one you just installed and choose -remove- I suppose you COULD just install them all and hope for the best…..and if the problem did return….work your way backwards un-installing office updates. Tallon41

I'll download them and install one at a time. Maybe I will leave the excel ones for a few weeks and see whether anything from Microsoft supersedes them. Thank you for your advice.