This may not be the likely forum for my problem, but I suspect that the astute forum members will have a solution for me.

When I was working normally in Word 2000 under Windows 98SE, the program closed for some not-obvious reason. When I opened it again, all toolbars were missing, and I had the following error message:

Microsoft Visual Basic
Run-time error '2147024809 (80070057)':
Can't move focus to the control because it's invisible, not enabled or of a type that does not accept the focus.

(End of error message)

I can use Word as long as I remember keyboard shortcuts. There is nothing I can do to get the menus back.

I have used the Office 2000 setup program to repair my installation and to uninstall and reinstall. Still with no success. I have reverted to the registry of this morning, before the problem occurred. Also no help. I also renamed Normal.dot, so that Word created a new file by that name; to no avail.

I have searched the Microsoft KB with no help. I did find reference to several error messages with this error code, but they referred to different problems and not mine.

What can I do, short of formatting and starting all over, which is an unacceptable solution for me?

I Have the same problem. did you ever find a solution

I did find a solution, but it's been a long time now. There is an MVP site (somewhere, I don't remeber exactly where) that discusses the problem. I forget what they said to do, but it did the job!

I'm sorry I don't have any more to tell you, but perhaps a Google search for (MVP) AND (Word) will help.

Please let me know if you find the solution. If necessary, I'll do a serach again.

I did find a solution on the web.

It had to do with changing an entry in the registry.

Before anybody does this they must back up the registry and
prepare a emergency repair disk.

Here is the solution and it worked for me

Renaming the Word Data Key from the registry might solve this problem off the bat. It should be found at:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Wo rd\Data. Rename the key Toolbars to TlbrBackup. Restart word. It should build a new Toolbar Reg key and you'll be fine.


We had a computer show this problem today. I did the rename and Word was back to normal.