Several of my users have been having an issue where they are typing in Outlook or Word and a "ghost" stripe appears above with some of what they have typed. I have tried several things I have found online including updating the bios and removing a registry entry and letting Office recreate it to no avail. I am going to attach an image showing what is happening. Any thoughts? I guess my next step is to either run a repair in Office or totally uninstall and reinstall...but that would be my last resort.

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More on this. I ran a repair from the CD and all was fine until this morning. Here I come to find out that all was fine because the user was operating Outlook maximized (taking up the whole screen) as I had her try. If she has the window smaller than that (Restore Down), then the issue occurs. I'm lost at what to try next. I would really rather now have to totally uninstall and reinstall Office, but.....

Hi,

Have you tried starting Outlook from a command line using the "/safe" switch? This effectively turns off all add-ins, and you can then determine if the problem is with an add-in (by turning them each off one by one), or if it's a display driver issue.

No, I have not. Despite my posting this in the Outlook forum (it happens most often in Outlook), it also happens in Word. Actually, one staff member had weird stuff happening in Excel today as well.

The fact that it is happening to 5 individuals and started at roughly the same time leads me to believe that it is a glitch with Microsoft Office that may have been caused by an update of some sort.

Also, my theory about it not happening if the user has the window maximized is incorrect. I just talked to another user that always has her Outlook maximized and it happens with almost every e-mail she sends.

I did just go around and turn off all of the add-ins in Outlook on 3 of the users' computers and told them to let me know if it helps.

Well, that didn't take long. The problem persists with all Outlook add-ins disabled. I guess I will try updating the video driver next.

OK...updated the video driver. Nada.

Went to the extent of uninstalling and reinstalling Office and making sure all the updates were downloaded. For a while, it seemed fine, but then she said it started doing it AGAIN.

What other options do I have? Chipset? Bios has already been done as has the video card. It's driving me nuts.

I think you should progress past an Outlook forum to something more advanced. I recommend http://superuser.com/ for generic, hard to figure out Windows questions.

I meant to update this, but got very busy this morning. I figured it out. I noticed a common oddity on all users having this problem. They have Hightail (formerly YouSendIt) installed and the icon in the systray was there, but invisible. If I right clicked on the icon and exited...problem solved!

The only thing I can think of is that there must have been an update to the Hightail software that changed something in Office that caused this issue.

Thread can be closed, but I wanted to post in case anyone else has such an issue.