Am I getting good tech advice about Word / Office being corrupted?

[Three Lefts]

In my small business office, I have a 2-node p2p network. We have a
Dell workstation and a Dell notebook. Both were purchased last summer
and are running Win XP Pro and Office 2007 Pro.

I purchased a tech support contract with a local company. They provide
remote support through a program they installed on our machines. They
manage updates to Windows & Office, backup to USB drives, antivirus,
and other services.

They ordered both machines and did the initial installation of the OS
and Office.

The workstation is used by my assistant. She has not installed
anything other than our business software (Quickbooks, TimeSlips, and
Time Matters). I have the notebook. I have installed some other
software, but no games or questionable (non-commercial) software.

Prior to last summer, we had leased our computers from a different
company who also provided tech support. We had two machines (both from
HP) running Win 2K and Office 2000. We were running mostly the same
applications. We had those machines for 5-6 years and almost no
problems.

Since upgrading to the new machines and switching tech support
companies, we have had a lot of problems. I just got off the phone
with one of the techs and I am concerned about what he rold me. I
would appreciate any opinions anyone might have.

The most recent problem started a few weeks ago. My assistant loaded
one of our templates and tried to do a global replace (Ctrl-H),
something we do many time a week. Word froze up solid. I had to kill
it from the Task Manager.

When I called tech support, they said that they had just installed a
service release and it had a bug that caused Replace to break. They
backed out the service release and everything was fine for awhile.
This happened on both machines.

The same problem resurfaced just in the workstation 2 days ago. My
notebook was fine. The tech remoted in today and tried to fix it.
After a couple of hours of work, he said that Office was corrupted. He
said he went to Add/Remove programs and tried to do a repair, he got a
message that the installation was corrupted.

Does this sound plausible? I know I haven't provided enough
information to know for sure, but does it sound plausible?

I ask because we have had a lot of pesky problems ever since upgrading
to these new machines. The machines run much more slowly than the
older machines and we have had programs crashing including Word and
Outlook. We have had problems where updates did not happen that should
have. The video on my notebook screen is very flakey. I can get the
screen all broken up in Word pretty much any time I want.

Now he wants to reinstall Office, which I presume means that we will
lose all of our settings. I guess I'll have to let him go ahead and do
that, but if we continue to have problems, I have to believe that
these guys don't know what they are doing. They have total control
over the machines and they have installed most of the software. If it
isn't working, can the fault be anywhere else?

Thanks for any comments or suggestions.

Frustrated...

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The only thing I can tell you definitely is that reinstalling Office won't
cause you to lose your settings, as reinstalling doesn't affect Normal.dot
or the Registry. It is also unlikely to help (for the same reason).

 

[Graham Mayor]

See http://www.gmayor.com/what_to_do_when_word_crashes.htm then
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/ProbsOpeningWord.htm Without going away
to check I am not sure if the latter has been updated to include reference
to Word 2007, but the principles still hold true.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Three Lefts]

The only thing I can tell you definitely is that reinstalling Office won't
cause you to lose your settings, as reinstalling doesn't affect Normal.dot
or the Registry. It is also unlikely to help (for the same reason).

What about running the Office Repair function? If the problem is a
corrupted file, will that fix, or at least identify, it?

And how do files get corrupted in the first place? Isn't the new file
system a lot more reliable?

We do not use our machines to download freeware, we do not play games,
we have a firewall, we have an up-to-date anti-virus program, and we
are supposed to have all of the latest updates. According to the tech,
one of those updates is what causes this problem in the first place.
Could that update or backing it out have caused the corruption?

I am very suspicious when we get the exact same error from supposedly
two sources.

 

[Terry Farrell]

I have to say that it does sound suspicious. The repair function should sort
out any corruption; but why would both be corrupt? Uninstalling and
reinstalling rarely resolves problems with Word issues, but as Suzanne
advises, it will not do anything to your documents or settings.

When they said that the service release broke the replace function, what
release were they referring to: ServicePack 1 perhaps? It has caused a
problem for some users where they do a global replace it hangs Word. The
workaround is to use the Replace button repeatedly rather than the
ReplaceAll - inconvenient but unless you are doing multiple replacements,
it's not too inconvenient until it is patched.