Hi
Thanks for bringing this issue up again.
Since the problem was first posted last September, the number of views of this question has increased considerably. Today it’s at 209. That’s not overwhelming, but it certainly is significant.
You have done everything I can think of to make sure this is not a preference problem, system problem or preferences problem. You performed a “bare metal install” of Mac OS X and Office and repaired disk permissions.
There’s one piece of information that seems to be missing from this Q&A thread, and that is which version of Mac OS X is involved. Is this problem affecting Mac OSX update 10.9.2? Some other version? If you are affected, please reply.
Meanwhile, I’ll “escalate” this question by alerting Microsoft to take a special look at this problem.