Office XP speech engine not working

I use the speech engine in Office XP but now everytime I try to initiate the program from Control Panel/ Speech I get the message " The requested task canot be carried out because the necessary engine could not be created. Please select a different engine and/or a different audio device"
The speech properties window gives only one engine Microsoft English ASR Version 5 any attempt to reset the microphone gives the same error message.
I do have a languge bar in Word and the micophone is active but speaking into the microphone gives sound from the speakers!

I have reninsalled the whole of Office to try to correct the problem but to no avail.

 

Complete instructions on setting up Speech Recognition software can be found here. Going through them again might help you spot the problem.

There are links to troubleshooting articles on that site as well.

 

Thanks Miz, I printed out and followed the instructions but I still am left with

" The requested task canot be carried out because the necessary engine could not be created. Please select a different engine and/or a different audio device"

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling speech to no avail
I think some entry must be left in the registry (maybe my a corrupted speech files or speech engine settings)
I do not know much about editing the registy so if this is the likley problem can anyone offer help on how to proceed?

 

Might have to go down the path of uninstalling Office XP, and running a couple of registry cleaners across your system to remove many of the registry entries left over.

EasyCleaner 2.0 Beta 1
http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/betas.htm

Regseeker 1.3
http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm

Reinstall Office XP, and go to Office update and update it to SP2.

 

Thanks Paul,
Did all of that BUT the problem still remains
The sound from the microphone comes out of the speakers instead of into the speech engine if that helps?
Anyone got any further ideas?

 

Solved the problem, for the record here is how
Run/regedit then find the folder
hkey_current_user/software/microsoft/speech
Export the folder to your desktop then change the folder name to oldspeech.
The speech program will then ask you to retrain.
Thanks to everyone
Gordon