Excel bug - cell comments become uneditable

[longtalker]

Sometimes I have this random problem that appears in Excel: the comment of a cell becomes "uneditable". I can see the comment as a tooltip if I hover above the cell, however if I select it and press Shift+F2 to edit its comment, nothing happens (the tooltip just "blinks" at every press).

I get this problem periodically for various spreadsheets, and I haven't been able to link it to any one cause - it can happen for any type of cell, anywhere in the spreadsheet, in any spreadsheet. Furthermore, even if I save the file as Excel 2003-compatible (I normally use Excel 2007) and open it in Excel 2003, the problem remains.

I should mention that I have not protected the workbook/worksheet, thus no cells are locked (although I did try protecting/unprotecting and locking/unlocking just to see whether this solves anything - it does not).

What's interesting is that if I choose to Show All Comments, then all the comments can be edited - not by choosing Edit Comment or pressing Shift+F2 (that still doesn't do anything) but by directly clicking inside the visible comment. Since I have lots of comments in my sheet, however, I would rather not have them visible all the time.

Has anyone come across this problem, and if so, managed to find a workaround for it? Anticipated thanks!

[mbsurfer]

I have this same problem on a spreadsheet. It is only comments that I've been editing every month for several years and now I cannnot edit these comments. I can't even edit these when I select "show all comments". I have a post titled "Edit comments not working for certain cells in a column Excel". I've been working in Excel for 25 years and have never seen this problem.
We need help.