Excel XP: left mouse button freaked out - tries insert?

[MakeItSo]

Hi friends, urgent help needed!

I thought I was pretty much ready to fix any fixable error a "normal" Excel user could produce.
I was sooo wrong.

One of my colleagues somehow managed to completely mess up mouse behaviour in Excel!
I open Excel at her workplace, do nothing but click on one of the Worksheet tabs at the bottom - BANG! The mouse icon turns into a sheet, Excel seems to try to insert some copied worksheet down there, I can see the little arrow with which I can determine where to place said sheet - but there IS none copied!
Neither right nor left mouse button will work anymore.
All I can do is right click Excel in the task bar and choose "exit".

Right mouse button won't work either, it will conjur up a selection rectangle, which cannot be set.


Anyone of you ever experienced such a freak out?

I tried googling for this problem but couldn't find anything.

It does not seem to be caused by the mouse: I went into controly panel, mouse, reset to default. No avail.
Replaced the mouse with a different one - no difference.

I can't find anything strange in Excel settings and the error is not workbook related. It happens with a blank Workbook too.

I've renamed the "Excel.xlb" in the user's application data folder, placed a clean, new, empty XLT, correctly named into the user's XLStart folder - all futile.


Any ideas?

All greatly appreciated!!


P.S: Haven't done an Office repair install yet; will probably do this later but I'd prefer an explanation for the mess up and - if possible - a solution.
This one got me stumped.

Thanks!
MakeItSo

[navy]"We had to turn off that service to comply with the CDA Bill."[/navy]
- The Bastard Operator From Hell

 

[MakeItSo]

Update: solved - without knowing what **really** happened.

Cause: the "nothing" this user did was simply this: she had exchanged the batteries on her MS wireless mouse. After that, Excel went nuts. Funnily it was **only** Excel behaving strangely.

Remedy: reboot.

Funny thing: I had reset the mouse settings to factory default as I had - correctly - assumed that this problem was caused by the mouse. However neither this, nor my exchanging the mouse with a simple Logitech cord mouse had any effect at all and still it was only Excel behaving thus.


Microsoft - there's obviously no end to its "undocumented features"... Would be happy if anyone knew anything about this one though. It's about as weird as it gets.


[navy]"We had to turn off that service to comply with the CDA Bill."[/navy]
- The Bastard Operator From Hell