I found some info that sounds like it pertains to your issue. The following applies to Office 2000 and Office XP:
SYMPTOMS
========
When using Help in a Microsoft Office family application the Answer Wizard and Index tabs may be blank.
CAUSE
=====
When Help is used and the Office Assistant is disabled, the file MSOHelp.exe displays the dialog with three tabs on the left
and a display area on the right for the active help topic. If there are two versions of MSOHelp.exe on the computer and the
user does not have Administrator rights, the Answer Wizard and Index tabs may appear empty.
It is normal to have two versions of this file on the machine if different versions of Microsoft Office applications are installed
on the machine. If an application from the following Group A is installed at the time as an application from the following
Group B, the application that was most recently installed or repaired will function properly but the application from the other
group will exhibit the problem.
Group A:
Any Microsoft Office 2000 suite
Microsoft Access 2000
Microsoft Excel 2000
Microsoft FrontPage 2000
Microsoft PowerPoint 2000
Microsoft Word 2000
Microsoft Project 2000
Microsoft Publisher 2000
Microsoft Visio 2000
Group B:
Any Microsoft Office XP suite
Microsoft Access 2002
Microsoft Excel 2002
Microsoft FrontPage 2002
Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
Microsoft Word 2002
Microsoft Project 2002
Microsoft Publisher 2002
Microsoft Visio 2002
Both versions of MSOHelp reference a specific pair of registry keys but expect the values of those keys to be different
depending on the version of MSOHelp using the keys. When it sees an unexpected value MSOHelp.exe attempts to
rewrite the keys with the expected value. If it is unable to change the registry keys, the Answer Wizard and Index tabs will
appear empty.
This problem does not occur on Windows 95/98/ME systems because the registry is not secure. However on Windows
2000/XP, normal users do not have permissions to write to the keys. The two registry keys that are referenced by
MSOHelp are:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MsoHelpAWDlg\CLSID
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MsoHelpKeyDlg\CLSID
WORKAROUND
==========
To prevent the tabs from appearing empty, modify the security permissions on the two registry keys to allow Full control for
the Everyone group.
MORE INFORMATION
================
Distributing the necessary changes via a Regini script:
The Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit tool, Regini.exe, can be used to distribute the registry security permission
changes to remote computers.
Regini can read the data from a script file. The Regini script file uses the following format for the data:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\MsoHelpAWDlg\CLSID [7]
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\MsoHelpKeyDlg\CLSID [7]
To use this, copy and paste the above contents into a new notepad file, and save the file as "msohelpreg.ini" taking care
that an extra blank line follows the last line of text.
The script may be invoked via the Regini tool with the following syntax:
regini.exe msohelpreg.ini
This could then be distributed to remote computers, for example, in a startup script.
