A vista laptop started to behave very strangely.

The customer would try to maximise a word 2003 window, but the maximised window wouldn’t occupy the entire screen (there would be a vertical bar of windows desktop on the right hand side of the screen).

And to make things even stranger, I couldn’t move the mouse into this vertical bar… it became a sort of windows no-go zone.

The wort part about it was that the right side of the application would be missing, as if the right of the window had gone “under” the desktop… this makes minimising quite difficult (unless you know the keyboard shortcuts!).

I tried other applications (outlook express, firefox, ie8, etc), but they all behaved the same way.

I also noticed that once all windows had been taken out of “maximize” mode, the inaccessible part of the screen could suddenly be accessed again (by both the mouse and the windows).

I started shutting down background apps, until I got to the old microsoft office bar (the one that hangs around windows and lets you quickly start office apps with a single click).

So, it turns out that an aspect of Office is very incompatible with Vista,