Access Data Source in Word Merges

After our IT Dept reloaded and reconfigured my PC to improve performance, I seem to have lost the ability to use access tables or queries as the data source for merging in Word. When I attempt to open a data source, I get an error message stating that "Word could not re-establish a DDE connection to Microsoft Access to complete the current task." Tables/queries can be exported to Excel and used as a data source, but the dynamic link is lost in doing merges that way. Interstingly enough, old merges created prior to reconfiguring my PC still work fine. The problem appears to be in just initiating a new link to Access. No one here seems to know how this happened or how to fix it. Can anyone help?