Can't print in Word 2007, Windows 7

Despite reviewing other posts/threads, can't figure this out. Very suddenly, cannot select printer in Word (though everything still works OK in Excel). When printer screen comes up, selected printer cell is blank. I try to select the default printer, which appears among the choices, but can't get it to select -- cell stays blank. At one point, clicking around the printer screen, got this strange message: "The Active Directory Domain Service is currently unavailable". Any ideas? Thanks for your help.

I tried the site you linked, and tried what Microsoft recommended, but to no avail. They advise installing a generic printer, which I did, but it only prints to file, which doesn't test much. I can select that printer in the printer setting screen, but when I try to select any other of the installed printers, I can't get them to show up in the selected printer box.

What is so puzzling about this is that it happened suddenly. Just yesterday I printed a Word document, and today I can't. It is most likely something that happened to Word, because everything prints just fine in Excel. I am stumped -- and also relatively non-technically-savvy on stuff like this.

Apologies to those who responded. I solved the problem by shutting down my laptop and starting it up again, though it took two starts.

What I think may have happened: I seldom shut my laptop completely down, I just leave it in suspend mode to avoid the startup wait time. So if I got an update from Microsoft while it is suspended, I may have missed the notice to restart the computer to finish the updates. The machine has been behaving strangely and slowly for about a week, but never to the point of not being useably functional. I'll have to be more attentive to those updates, and rescan with my Webroot and Malwarebytes more often.