MS Word Crashes on opening.....basic troubleshooting has failed... 1

[Kelanen]

Okay, I've just built a new machine for my mother, and everything works perfectly except that MS Word 2000 crashes between 2-30 seconds after opening. I'm an IT Manager, so I know my way around a PC, and have tried all the basic (and not so basic) ways to troubleshoot this, but now I'm stuck....really stuck!


The System: Brand new PC - WinXP Home (legal and activated), Athlon XP2600, 512mb RAM, 120gb HDD, 64mb Graphics card, etc (ie: not cutting edge, but more than adequate for a machine that will be used for Word, Outlook, and IE).


Symptoms and Attempted Fixes:

MS Office was installed from a known working (and original) disk and no errors were generated on installation.

The system hangs whether or not the application is in use, and usually well after the Virus Scan function in Word has completed. Task Manager shows that the CPU is not under load, and the system has RAM to spare (not to mention virtual memory)

MS Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook and IE all work just fine, even for extended periods, as do Fireworks, the printer, scanner, and camera software. I theorise therefore doesn't appeared to be a shared resource problem.

After reconfiguring Outlook to use MS Word as the default email editor, that functionality also continues to work properly (I'm not sure how much of Word this actually uses in real terms however).

Prior to hanging, the application functions fully, and you can write and format text, explore the menus, access 'Customize' & 'Options', etc

Word has been run from command line using the /a option (just loads base program, no templates, add-ins or plug-ins) but this made no difference whatsoever.

The problem exists in all user profiles, including the administrator, and newly created profiles.

The system has up to date Anti-Virus, and a software Firewall. Both AV scans and Stinger have been run and determined the system completely clean.

Both the AV and Firewall have been disabled, and this made no difference.

Scan disk has been run and finds no logical or physical faults, and the drive has been defragged several times.

The error has been reported to Microsoft via the XP reporting tool, but it doesn't trigger a link to a known problem and workaround or solution.

The system has had have every Windows and Office service pack and software update that is even remotely applicable, (including all SP's and critical updates, applicable or not).

Office 2k and Word 2k by itself have been both repaired and reinstalled several times. Word has been uninstalled, large amounts of data copied to the HDD, the HDD defragmented, and then Word added back in (purpose: to make sure it installs on a different section of the drive, and more or less eliminate bad sector possibilities).

Okay - the really strange one... First Word 2003 and later the whole Office 2003 suite has been installed (over the top of 2k, and after uninstalling 2k first) and again Word has the same problem, the other applications don't (Does anyone know how much the app changed from 2k to 2003?). The 2003 installations were all activated (with a legal and unused license) - so this is definitely not the issue.

Possible lead/red herring - the Office 2003 pack also contains MS Publisher, so when I installed all of it (after trying a Word only upgrade) and tested the apps, Publisher exhibits the same problem as Word. Since I don't have a Publisher CD of the 2000 version, I can't cross compare. The last version of Publisher that I used was of the Win98/Office97 variety - and there was clear blue water between that and Word - does anyone know if this has changed?


...and after all this, MS Word still bloody doesn't work!

As a last attempt, I can try to install Word 97 on there, but I'm not overly hopeful since Word 2003 didn't do the trick.

After that, I'm left with "format the hard drive and start again..." (remembering to cross fingers during installations this time) unless someone here has a bright idea?



Jonathan Challis
IT Manager

 

[KenWright]

Try here for a FAQ on this subject, and take a look at normal.dot first perhaps:-

faq68-646

Regards
Ken..............

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It's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission

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[Kelanen]

Thanks Ken,

Most of this has been tried, but I'll try renaming the normal.dot (ignored this since it was a clean install) and the MS Eraser...

Thanks,

Jonathan Challis
IT Manager

 

[Kelanen]

The normal.dot is local to each profile, so that can't be it. I tried it anyway, but it had no effect. Ditto, the Template and Startup contents.

The Eraser utility doesn't work for WinXP (it warns against it several times). I'm going to try anyway, since my next recourse is a format and reinstall anyway, so I don't actually have anything to lose.

Anyone have any more ideas?


Jonathan Challis
IT Manager

 

[aronb]

I have a simliar problem. But amazingly it didn't go away when i reformatted the hd! Not only that, it now shows up in corel's wordperfect suite (which as a last ditch effort i installed to use a different word processer).

Please someone help me out. I know this sounds impossible, but it's true.

Thanks,

 

[Kelanen]

Okay....

As mentioned above, the Eraser utility doesn't work with WinXP, but there is another document detailling a list of files and folders to manually delete.

...The only problem is that Windows won't let you delete most of them (even as an administrator, with almost all the processes shutdown!)

Looks like I'm in Formatting the hard drive territory, unless someone has any other ideas? (Hope it's more successful than AronB's format).


Jonathan Challis
IT Manager

 

[Kelanen]

Oh one more maybe useful clue....

Notepad (very basic text editor) works fine but Wordpad (WYSIWYG text editor) does not....

Jonathan Challis
IT Manager

 

[Kelanen]

Okay - I've sorted it!

For anyone interested (primarily aronb) the problem was the printer driver - delete the printer it works beautifully. It was an old printer (albeit with the XP drivers) so I guess this was the problem.

This would obviously explain why it occurred with different versions of word, and also why aronb still saw the issue after formatting and changing to Word Perfect.


Jonathan Challis
IT Manager

 

[MakeItSo]

Sounds reasonable.
Never had that problem. But in case anyone has a similar one, it might be worth a try.

Cheers,
MakeItSo

 

[aronb]

I tried deleting all the applicable printers. Let's see if that works.

thanks for the idea,