Mr. Paperclip is Unhappy

Not such a 'new user' but I couldn't find a more specific board.

Got Office XP running on Windows XP SP 2. Office has all updates per
Microsoft Update.

In Word, when I call on Mr. Paperclip for help, he appears for a second, and
then he disappears and "Microsoft Agent Server has encountered a problem..."
So I tried to Detect and Repair, but "msiexec.exe cannot be started" and
immediately after that "Error starting MS Help".

Excel works perfectly - Mr. Paperclip is fine, as is the Help function. So I
tried to Detect and Repair from Excel, which worked. But Word still has the
same problem.

Aside from not writing well, what is my problem and how should I solve it?

Larry Ostroff