Can someone help me figure out why I can't keep a Word document op

[carl1061]

My situation is complicated. I'll start at the present time, then give some
background.

My PC (not the computer I'm typing on right now) is in a storage room. I
have it, the printer, the monitor, the keyboard and the mouse plugged into a
power strip in the storage room, and I have an extension cord that I can plug
all of that into an AC adapter 25 feet away. It's too long a story to explain
why I have this setup, so I'll just jump straight into the problem from here:

Today I powered everything up for the first time, and everything worked fine
except Word. I could print an Excel spreadsheet and a PDF file, but I
couldn't print a Word document off my desktop or from my flash drive. The
document on the desktop was there before I put the computer into storage.

Every time I opened Word, it immediately closed and cited a Runtime error
that made it shut down unexpectedly. After three attempts I found something
called Debug, and I was able to print the document (it came out three times),
but then I tried again to open Word and couldn't keep it open long enough to
work with it.

I reinstalled Office 2003, and still no luck.

The PC is a Dell Dimension 4400. I have used it for seven years with few
problems. Before I put it in storage (May 18) I printed from it with
regularity.

I have no Internet access in the storage room, but everything else is
powered up.

What are possible reasons I am having trouble with Word?

I can tell you I'm not very computer savvy. A few weeks before I put it in
storage, I needed to use the computer's calculator, and it wasn't there
anymore. I put in the XP disk to see if that would help, and maybe I
unchecked a few things in Windows Add/Remove, but even if I did that,
everything seemed to work fine after that.

Is this an XP problem? Is this a Word problem? Is it because I have no
Internet access? I need this PC to be able to print documents. I can write on
other computers, but printing is an issue with those computers. That's why I
set up the one in my storage room as a working office (with no Internet,
though).

Any ideas? I'd be grateful if someone can help me. Thanks.

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

The usual causes of such problems with Word are:

1. Misbehaving add-in.

2. Corrupted Normal.dot (solution: delete Normal.dot)

3. Corrupted registry entry (usually the Data key). Solution: delete the
Data key, which is located here in Word 2003:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word

Note that reinstalling Office does nothing to help solve this problem, since
Office setup tends to preserve existing settings (i.e., Normal.dot and the
Data key).


For further information, this article describes how to troubleshoot the
problem:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/ProblemsStartingWord.htm