DOCX Incompatible Between Word 2010 and Word 2007 - randomly drops spaces from between words.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541 

NOTE:  part of this procedure is disabling addins. If you want to take a shortcut, check to see if you have a BlueTooth device driver or addin, ie “send to Bluetooth”, installed. Disabling BlueTooth is rapidly moving to the top of my Office trouble shooting process. Blue Tooth drivers have been identified as the cause of problems with many different “random” symptoms. If you have BlueTooth, disable it in control panel, device manager and possibly as an addin in Office apps.  It’s not that I think there is anything inherently bad with Blue Tooth. The problem is with the people writing the drivers.

At this point, you have also think about any software or plugins that you may have installed on your computer. Annoyingly, this problem with Word can be caused by a program that is completely unrelated to Word!

Did you recently install some new hardware? A printer, scanner, label machine, web cam, tablet, etc? Have you installed any software? If so, uninstall it and see if the problem goes away.  The following Skype links are an example of this issue

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2697462

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/excel/thread/0cffef67-afca-45ad-b75d-3eeb4a859983 

Starting in March 2012, "Skype click to Call" has been causing problems File Open problems, and Copy/Paste problems in Office Apps.

The quick test for this problem is to close all open browsers. If the problem goes away it is probably Skype.

March 30 – MS has released an update to Skype that fixes the problem. Go to the Skype site, download and install the newest version ofc the program.

<snip>

For anyone reading this, I figured out the problem after surfing the web for the past 3-4 weeks. Painful process. I have a paid version of Advanced SystemCare Pro, v5.2.0. 3-4 weeks ago, while scanning through it's vast offerings, I came across a feature I could activate called "Smart RAM". I turned it on and checked the 5 boxes it offers in the settings. The last of those 5 is "Clean Clipboard". I unchecked this box a few minutes ago and it fixed my issues. I now have no problems with copy/paste. Info only, it case it helps anyone.

<snip>

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/fix-microsoft-word-has-stopped-working

Alright, well, I found the answer to this final issue: I only needed to disable the Bluetooth add-in on Options. I have no idea why that would have been the problem, but I found it as a suggested fix here. Now every single thing opens quickly and without error.

Thanks for all your help everyone.

As a recap:

• My Office 2010 was a Click-to-Run version
• Word suddenly giving me messages about "Downloading the Required Feature," freezing up, slowing down...
• Ultimately had to uninstall Office
• Reinstalled it from the Microsoft website with my product key, choosing the 64-bit version instead of the Click-to-Run version
• Installed all new updates from Windows Updates
• Restarted computer
• Word working quickly with no messages, but became unresponsive when trying to open old files
• Went to File->Options->Add-Ins->Go-> and unchecked Bluetooth.
• Everything seems to be back to normal, if not better than before.

The problem is caused by a defective Bluetooth add-in for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, turn off the Com Addin.

Additional Notes:

1. The defective Bluetooth add-in is usually installed by a Bluetooth driver. (In my case - Intel Centrino Wireless Bluetooth 3.0 + High Speed Adaptor (v1.1))
2. Updating your Bluetooth driver (or reverting to an older version) may also resolve the problem.
3. Unfortunately simply disabling the add-in through the Word options may result in a 3 second freeze when loading Word 2007. (If this is a problem, changing to a different bluetooth driver version may be the better option)

Oddly enough, this ended up being the cause of my problem. I had an older print driver installed on my Windows 7 machine and once I removed that driver, Word started working without any problems!

You can delete individual printer drivers by going into the registry. Note that simply going to Printers and Faxes and deleting a printer there does not delete the printer driver.

Follow Step 3 in my previous post about a printer error to remove the printer drivers:

http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/fix-the-printer-spooler-service-terminated-unexpectedly/

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322743

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=820919

As a general rule, when something seems to be going wrong, or at least not the way you want it to go, in Word, any version, go to Tools and then Options and study all the settings on all the tabs. You may even find some settings that you want to try that have nothing to do with the current problem.

When I was teaching Word and other Microsoft Office programs at a private business college, I had three rules:

1.         Always check Tools Options

2.         When in doubt, right-click on something

3.         If you're wondering how to set up a special kind of material in a document, consider whether Word tables are suitable. The placement officer of the school came to me several times and asked how I thought she should set something up. Each time the answer was, "I'd use a Word table." By the fifth time she had stopped asking--she got the point.

I am a Microsoft employee, I lead the Program Management team for Office Sustaining Engineering.

This is a known issue with Word 2007. The issue is also discussed in another thread.

The issue has already been addressed in a release that first appeared on September 25, 2008. The "non-security fixes" section of the article describes the behavior. The knowledge base article and solution for the problem are located under the link. For Office 2007 users who will receive your documents, ensure they are current on updates for Office. Specifically, ensure the patch referenced in the link above is installed, or ensure the user of 2007 has installed Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

The easiest way to obtain the fix is to install Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

This is an issue related to opening files that we discovered and fixed before the shipment of Office 2010. It was important enough for us to push the fix through the security update channel. At Microsoft we were able to re-produce the problem on machines which did not have the patch installed for Office 2007, and we are unable to reproduce the problem on machines that have the patch installed.

Yesterday we re-tested this problem based on the information being reported in the forums and on various blogs. There are a few details worth noting:

- If you have already saved the document in an unpatched version of Word and the spaces are missing, unfortunately there is no way to recover them.
- When you send the file to other users from Office 2010, unpatched users who edit the document may cause the spaces to disappear. It is important to ensure Office 2007 users are patched with this update, and ensuring that can be done by turning on Automatic Updates.

Related to the other forum post on this topic:
- In our testing, turning spooling services on and off did not affect the problem.
- Additionally, the presence (or not) of a specific printer driver or any printer driver did not solve or cause the problem.

As has been reported on various blogs, the Open XML standard is not the cause of the issue. This is an issue with Word 2007, and we believe a solution has been available since 2008.

We certainly regret any inconvenience this issue may have caused.

If you patch your 2007 installation to the current update level, and you are authoring documents on patched versions of Word 2007 (or 2010), and you still experience this problem, please don't hesitate to contact us.

This is our team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/.
This is our Twitter stream: http://twitter.com/officeUpdates

You can send feedback or requests for help regarding files that submit this behavior (for patched versions of Word) via the email link on my blog:http://blogs.technet.com/gray_knowlton. We are very interested to know if users are still experiencing this problem after systems are patched.

Regards,

Gray Knowlton
Group Program Manager
Office Customer and Partner Engineering Services