This issue is affecting all of my Office 2016 Pro products, but it is inconsistent. Mostly I have noticed the problem with Word and Excel, as I use those the most, but it has also come up in Powerpoint regularly.
I will open Word and start a new document; everything will be fine at first. Eventually something will happen that I am not aware of (I do not notice anything obviously change) and after that moment I will be unable to fully interact with any of the ribbon buttons like "Home," "Insert," "Design," "Layout" etc. If I attempt to click on the tab, the view of the tab will not change but I can still "ghost over" the buttons that SHOULD be there. For example, I start on HOME, the tab view gets locked somehow, I attempt to click INSERT and mouse over where the "insert file" button should be. If I click, the insert file dialog box will pop up as normal. Additionally, once whatever tab I am on is "locked," I can still interact with the buttons on that tab, but the buttons will not act as they normally should. For example the button will not darken once clicked on.
Sometimes the performace of the Office application will also be degraded when this mysterious bug pops up, but it is less common. I can't be 100% sure, but it seems as though if I switch to another tab, or minimize office, the bug is more likely to happen. Once it happens, it never ever fixes itself until I close the program completely and reopen. It will start normal, and then break again after a short, but random amount of time.
This was not a problem at all until 2-3 weeks ago.
Solutions I have tried:
Repairing Office - no change
Rolling back updates following one of the guides on this site.... would not allow me to do this, always said "you have the most recent version" no matter what version I tried to roll back to.
uninstalling my virus scan - no change
uninstalling office and reinstalling (with no virus scan) - no change
Version 1609 (Build 7369.2038)