Publisher won't mail merge

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After having problems getting win updates to work, I uninstalled and re-installed Office 2003. Win update then worked, but now Publisher won’t connect docs to their data sources. Trying to point the doc to the correct data source gives the error:
This operation cannot be completed because of dialog or database engine failures. Please try again later.
This occurs with about 45 Publisher mail merge docs. About half of them connect to one data source and the other half connect to another data source. Neither data source can be connected to the Publisher docs. The data sources are tables in Word docs. I have recreated the data sources several times to no avail. The Word doc data sources open just fine on their own. I have uninstalled and re-installed Publisher again to no avail. I have run CCleaner and there seems to be nothing untoward wrong with the registry.
I am using Win7.
HELP!

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I got rid of Office 2003 some time ago as Publisher was letting me down on several fronts. Most importantly (to me) was that it stopped allowing me to wrap text around images.
I tried the update/uninstall/reinstall route to no avail and when I found the same problem was afflicting Word, I simply ditched the lot.
I’ve replaced Publisher with Serif PagePlus X2, which does a much better job anyway, albeit at the expense of being a little more difficult to learn and for the rest, I’ve got Go Open Office.
Google Docs look pretty good too.

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Thanks Brendan.
I solved the problem – well not really. I did away with using Word tables as the data source and changed to using tables from within Access. Cleaner and more efficient, as I already use Access to open the Publisher docs.
Frustrating that Word tables suddenly wouldn’t work though!

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