Garfield,
I didn't find the referenced information of practical use,
but I did find a document titled "Problems opening Word"
by 4 MVPs (Rado, Melton, Rindsberg, and Lucas) that looks
good. Here's the first part of the section relating to the
problem I am having.
"2. If Word crashes as soon as it opens ...
a)
It is most likely to be due to template corruption. To
verify whether this is the case, start Word without
templates and add-ins loaded, to see whether it still
crashes: to do this, click the Start button in the bottom
left of your screen, select Run, and type winword.exe /a.
(You may need to specify the full path although you
probably won't.)
Note the space before the forward slash! If you miss out
that space, you'll get an error message such as: "Cannot
find the file 'winword.exe/a' or one of its components".
The /a switch is intended as a troubleshooting tool only,
and you shouldn't continue to use it to start Word. Any
customisations you make while in this mode will be
discarded.1
If that fixes it, either your Normal.dot template or one
of the files in Word's Startup path are probably corrupt,
so the next steps to try are:
i)
Try renaming your Normal.dot file (with Word closed - and
if Outlook is your email editor, close Outlook as well,
and if you have opened a Word document within Internet
Explorer, close IE too).
For instance, try renaming Normal.dot to Normal.old - and
make sure you only have one Normal.dot file. If you cannot
see the file extensions (as in Normal.dot) see the
reference to switching their display on in ii) below."
Using the above procedure I was able to start Word without
it crashing, and so I went to C:\WINDOWS\Application
Data\MICROSOFT\Templates in order to rename the Normal.dot
file. However when I got there I could not find the
Normal.dot file. What I did find were files named
Normal.doc, Normal, and Normal.old. I recall having a
problem opening Word in the past, and the Dell tech rep
may have had me rename the Normal.dot file to Normal.old,
but it was too long ago for me to remember.
The MVP document does not cover this contingency, so I
will apreciate whatever help you or others can provide in
knowing how to proceed from this point to an ultimate
solution.
