Paul -

And how is the keyboard shortcut disabled? I tried whatever I could think of and whatever was suggested in innumerable online sources, and nothing worked for me (or for most others, as far as I could tell from comments). Since I have never intentionally used the Research task pane (I prefer doing my research in multiple tabs of a separate browser window), it makes perfect sense to completely disable the task pane.

Using the Alt key with the mouse is an invaluable functionality, which enables selection of a rectangular block of text which is not the full column wide and which can be pasted elsewhere in its block configuration. This is valuable to me when I am editing guitar tablature. The problem is that selecting a block only a single character wide would not select the block, but instead pop open the most useless task pane I've ever encountered.