Thanks Paul.

Just to close out this thread and tie it back to an earlier post.

Her machine was running Office 10 Home and Business.
1. Excel started displaying aberrant mouse and icon behavior.
2. I attempted repair and remove(X) then 'all from computer' to no avail.
3. She attempted to open Publisher (I know that I had validated same at initial install some time ago). Pub wanted the serial number. I entered it and after thinking for a bit said it didn't match--which is nonsense.
4. I had 2 reasonable alternatives: uninstall all Office 10 and re install (requiring a complete setup of Outlook again) or simply hide her Excel and Pub desktop icons to where she wouldn't find/use them and get confused + install MY Office 7 copy of Excel and Pub.
5. I did #4b and if the only casualty is a couple of extraneous .exe files that will not compete--I think we're good to go :-)

Mark