Plagued.  That’s how I’ve felt today.  But I finally solved the problem, and it had nothing to do with installing any plug-ins or uninstalling any plug-ins or the server, or anything like that.  However, for good measure, I’ll lay out the basic steps that I took before I actually solved the problem.

The problem at hand deals with using the visual editor to write your posts in WordPress.  It’s a feature that allows for quick formatting using a toolbar above your composition area.  If you are unable to switch between Visual and HTML editing modes (tabs in the post editor) then you’ve got the same problem I had.  Your mouse may appear to recognize that there is a link when you roll over Visual or HTML, but nothing happens when you click.  It’s a very annoying problem.

Sometimes solving this problem requires Safely Reinstalling WordPress to ensure the latest files are uploaded to your server.  If you aren’t familiar with this process, please read my article on how to do this.

If you don’t want to do this, then I can’t guarantee that you will solve your problem.  After all was said and done, I actually didn’t need a complete re-installation.  I narrowed the problem down to one simple silly problem.

There was a space between php?> and <?php somewhere in one of my files.  It turned out that my custom_functions.php file ( I use Thesis as my theme ) had a few empty spaces after the end php tag ( php?> ) in a few different spots.  Once I found those and removed them, the problem was gone.  It helped to have installed a fresh copy of everything, but it was more time consuming.

If you aren’t using Thesis, the culprit may in fact be another file in your blog folder structure, most likely a plug-in.  You should deactivate all of your plug-ins in order to troubleshoot this issue.  Deactivating all of them is okay now because they’ll all be lumped in a “recently active” heading which enables you to bulk activate them when you’ve found the problem.

Of all of the solutions that have been offered, the only one that I have found to fix the problem is removing blank spaces from within php code.  If you suck at code surfing, you may have trouble with this, but I would bet that if you’re self-hosting your WordPress blog, you have probably picked through your php files to figure out some things here and there and will be able to figure it out.