Office 2007 online help not working

I get this message when launching help in Office 2007...

This page is unavailable
The page you are looking for is unavailable. Try the following:
Click Refresh on the toolbar
Click Back on the toolbar, and then click the link to the page again
Show offline content from this computer.

....the offline help is fine

I had a similiar problem with help in Vista, there was a patch available to
fix some XML problem. Could this be related?

I have Office 2007 installed in Vista Ultimate RTM

If you're using a firewall check to see if it's allowing the Office Help engine to connect.

If you start Word 2007 help set to Off line mode (lower right corner of the help page frame) and do a search and then switch to
online help mode, does the search result work?

Firewall products often are quite specific in the programs they allow through. For Office 2007 check that CLView.exe
(Microsoft Office Help Viewer)
has access.

It's not a firewall issue as emails are being sent and received fine in
Outlook and Word can access the net when I need it to (except for help). I'm
running OneCare.

Running CLVIEW.EXE on it's own gives the message "Invalid command line
arguments: host application name or namespace not defined"

CLView.exe is called by the Help program in Office, that error would be normal trying to run it 'manually'.

If you've run the Office diagnostics or a reinstall and checked that that program has permission to access the internet and that the
settings for Online content are turned on in the Office 2007 app options then using either IE6 or IE7 that's an odd issue.

Did you have the beta version of Office on the computer previously?

I did have the beta version installed yes, uninstalled it and installed my
full version of Office 2007 Enterprise. Do you think removing all
files/folders/registry srttings would fix it?

I did have this problem in the final beta too but not in the earlier beta.

I'm having the same problem. Instead of displaying a search window, pushing
the "help" button launches IE with the Microsoft Office Online home page.
I've set permission in the firewall for CLView.exe, and tried repairing the
installation. Still no luck. I'm running Windows Vista Business. This is
a clean install.

I am haveing the same problem with Office 2007. When I go to create a new
document, then say I want to create an agenda from Microsoft Office Online,
It states that I either Retry or Troubleshoot my connection. My connection
is good. I retry and it does not connect. I am able to get to the website
so I know that it is not the website. Any assistance would be greatly
appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Any solution to this yet, after 3 years? I have this problem on my laptop running Windows 7 and McAfee, but not on the desktop, running XP and ZoneAlarm. I have give clview.exe full access to the Internet, and it will not access the page.

I'm new to the forums and now new to the issue... is this possibly an MSXML or .NET issue? I've pulled the Microsoft Help folder and forced Office 2007 (SB) to push through the setup again and still recieve the error "with one or more of the help files." I almost got the CLView to pull up on its own by running the line "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\CLVIEW.EXE" "WINWORD" "Microsoft Office Word" but then it choked and bomed again. I personally don't think this is an Office issue. I'm tending tho think this is a subsystem/component problem. I have a TP T60 that has just about every flavor of MSXML and .NET installed and am wondering if maybe something isn't registering properly. Any takers?

We have Help 2.x!!!

I uninstalled all MSXML parsers from the machine and uninstalled all .NET.
After a couple reboots I went on and installed MSXML 3, then 4 and then 6. I
fired up Word 2007 and viola!!! Help came right up. Another reboot. I then
went on and reinstalled .NET 2.0. Now, I did go out to Microsoft Update and
there were a couple of updates to MSXML 6 which I was rather leary about.
Since they were specifically for MSXML 6 I went on ahead and ran them.

You have to be careful with the .NET packages since they do embed themselves
rather heartely. BUT, it worked. Looks like we have a bit of an issue with
MSXML & the CLView / MS Help 2.x. Only reason I say this is because it is
becoming more and more apparent over time that folks are running in to this
identical problem. I pray that my little escapade above helps others as well.
Good luck....

[elpeacen]

Is this issue still open?

I too am having the same basic issue. That is, CLVIEW.EXE will not connect to any actual help files in any Microsoft application, including all Office 2007 programs and Web Expressions 2.

When I open help, the CLVIEW.EXE program opens the help window, but I can not get to any actual help files. Entering a keyword in the search field does absolutely nothing. Trying to pick an item from the Table of Contents also fails.

I've done just about everything discussed so far like making sure CLVIEW.EXE is approved by the firewall (even tried turning the firewall off).

I've uninstalled/reinstalled MS Office. I've used the windows add/remove (change) program to try the repair. Nothing works.

This problem popped up once a few months ago when I installed Vista SP2. My only "fix" back then was to completely rebuild the OS and reformat the hard disk.

Oddly enough, I just reinstalled Vista SP2 again the other day when this same problem reappeared. I might try uninstalling Vista SP2 to see if that helps.

Has anyone come up with a definitive solution to this issue? Living without help files is a real drag.

I can't get my help working correctly. When I changed the drop-down list to "Offline help", I finally get an initial dialog box, but when I click on one of the links in the message, it does nothing. Does anyone know why?

When I select "online help", nothing comes up. I tried allowing the clview in my firewall, but nothing doing.

[Johnbes]

Try adding office.microsoft.com and config.office.microsoft.com to your list of trusted sites.