Crash on inserting footnote or endnote

[Jeff Dean]

I am running Word 2004 (Office update 11.2.6) on a PowerMac G4 in Mac
OS X 10.4.7. I have just tried to start reworking an old document
(created in Word 98 in 2000) with endnotes. I converted them all to
footnotes, but as soon as I tried to insert a new footnote (before the
first old note, if that makes any difference), Word crashed. I tried
all sorts of variations: keeping the notes as endnotes, cutting and
pasting text, rekeying from scratch. Every time, as soon as I tried to
insert a note, Word crashed. Sometimes other applications would crash
as well, and once EVERYTHING open as well as half my Dashboard widgets
all crashed.

After that, I ran fsck and repaired permissions, with no problems
showing up...

The behavior was that (a) it would take Word an unusually long time to
insert the (foot/end)note reference in the main text, then (b) it would
take an unusually long time for the note window to appear and the note
reference to appear there, and finally (c) before the cursor would
start blinking to allow text entry in the note, the application would
crash.

I should point out that I've been using Word continuously since 1985.
The only trouble I ordinarily have is with advanced features that
aren't very well documented, or with glitches that show up with new
versions or updates of the OS. Is this one of the latter? Has anyone
else experienced anything like this? What should I do?

TIA, Jeff

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Jeff:

It's not reasonable to assume that just because Word crashes, there's
something wrong with Word That's usually the LAST place to look

There's plenty that can go wrong with a document that can crash Word, and in
this case I suspect it has. The slowness you describe in (a) and (b) is
pretty diagnostic: the document's internal structure has become damaged and
Word is struggling to sort it out.

Do a Standard Maggie (copy all except last paragraph mark to a new
document). That should fix it. If you copy the last paragraph mark, you
will copy the problem: it's likely a corruption in the document properties
store which is hidden below that paragraph mark.

Doing a Maggie forces Word to rebuild the properties and usually cleans
things up. In the case of Endnotes/footnotes this is not always successful,
but it's the first thing to try. Endnotes (particularly if they're created
by the Application named EndNotes) are a very severe test of the Word
document structure, which often gets a bit frayed and tattered as a result
of inserting them.

Changing to an operating system that wasn't even on the drawing board when
Word was built, was a brave move! For a long and happy life with a computer
one should run mission-critical applications on the operating system they
were designed for. Usually we get away with it. In this case, there are
some issues: it's not perfectly stable.

I'm not sure that all Dashboard widgets have been given a clean bill of
health, have they? We've had incompatibilities with haxies before, but I am
not sure if Dashboard widgets come under that heading

Then again, changing to an Intel processor was thrill-seeking The
internal processor instructions are all swapped end-for-end, which is about
as radical a change as you can make to software. I'm surprised it works at
all

The bottom line is that Word 2004 has a few issues with OS 10.4.7 and is
quite fragile on an Intel processor.

Try a Maggie.

Also: check here:
http://www.word.mvps.org/mac/crash-macintel-word.html

Some of the symptoms you are describing suggest that you are also suffering
this bug. There's an update on the way from Apple for that one.

Hope this helps

I am running Word 2004 (Office update 11.2.6) on a PowerMac G4 in Mac
OS X 10.4.7. I have just tried to start reworking an old document
(created in Word 98 in 2000) with endnotes. I converted them all to
footnotes, but as soon as I tried to insert a new footnote (before the
first old note, if that makes any difference), Word crashed. I tried
all sorts of variations: keeping the notes as endnotes, cutting and
pasting text, rekeying from scratch. Every time, as soon as I tried to
insert a note, Word crashed. Sometimes other applications would crash
as well, and once EVERYTHING open as well as half my Dashboard widgets
all crashed.

After that, I ran fsck and repaired permissions, with no problems
showing up...

The behavior was that (a) it would take Word an unusually long time to
insert the (foot/end)note reference in the main text, then (b) it would
take an unusually long time for the note window to appear and the note
reference to appear there, and finally (c) before the cursor would
start blinking to allow text entry in the note, the application would
crash.

I should point out that I've been using Word continuously since 1985.
The only trouble I ordinarily have is with advanced features that
aren't very well documented, or with glitches that show up with new
versions or updates of the OS. Is this one of the latter? Has anyone
else experienced anything like this? What should I do?

TIA, Jeff

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

If the Maggie doesn't work, round-trip the doc through HTML as mentioned
here:
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/DocumentCorruption.html


Side note:

John, EndNote does not *create* endnotes at all (or footnotes). It just
loads them up with complicated fields inside Word-created endnotes. I don't
think EndNote will do any numbering at all inside a Word doc.

 

[Jeff Dean]

Dear John,

Your prompt advice was welcome, and it contained some useful
suggestions I hadn't thought of, but quite a bit of it was out of place
and suggested you hadn't read my original post very carefully.

It's not reasonable to assume that just because Word crashes, there's
something wrong with Word That's usually the LAST place to look

There's plenty that can go wrong with a document that can crash Word, and in
this case I suspect it has. The slowness you describe in (a) and (b) is
pretty diagnostic: the document's internal structure has become damaged and
Word is struggling to sort it out.

I didn't actually say that something was wrong with Word, but asked
what to do to solve my problem. But I now do think something has gone
wrong with Word on my machine, because I can't insert a note into a
clean document. I did say I'd tried rekeying the text from scratch. I
have tested the situation by trying to insert a footnote into a brand
new document (no other open documents in Word), with precisely the same
results, including the slow behavior. There doesn't seem to be any
point trying a Maggie on the suspect document if I can't insert notes
in a fresh one. Any ideas?

Otherwise:

Changing to an operating system that wasn't even on the drawing board when
Word was built, was a brave move! For a long and happy life with a computer
one should run mission-critical applications on the operating system they
were designed for. Usually we get away with it. In this case, there are
some issues: it's not perfectly stable.

I have no idea what this is about. I began by saying I'm using the
latest version of Word in the latest version of OS X. Are you saying I
musn't update OS X beyond whatever version was current when I installed
or updated Word? Or that Word 2004 can't be expected to handle a file
that originated in Word 98? I thought the file format had remained the
same since Windows Word 97.

I'm not sure that all Dashboard widgets have been given a clean bill of
health, have they? We've had incompatibilities with haxies before, but I am
not sure if Dashboard widgets come under that heading

The widgets that I got specific information about quitting unexpectedly
were in fact ones that Apple distributes with Tiger. I thought Tiger
handled the Dashboard in a totally separate memory space; it makes me
worry if an application or a document is interfering with that.

Then again, changing to an Intel processor was thrill-seeking The
internal processor instructions are all swapped end-for-end, which is about
as radical a change as you can make to software. I'm surprised it works at
all

I never said I'd switched to Intel, but rather that I'm running on a
G4! I have no plans to move to an Intel Mac before MS Office and
Creative Suite are compatible.

Thanks,
Jeff

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Jeff,

On 9/12/06 7:21 AM, "Jeff Dean" wrote:

But I now do think something has gone
wrong with Word on my machine, because I can't insert a note into a
clean document. I did say I'd tried rekeying the text from scratch. I
have tested the situation by trying to insert a footnote into a brand
new document (no other open documents in Word), with precisely the same
results, including the slow behavior. There doesn't seem to be any
point trying a Maggie on the suspect document if I can't insert notes
in a fresh one. Any ideas?

Consistent and reproducible problems in Word usually respond to one of the
standard troubleshooting measures, which you will find listed here:

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/TroubleshootingIndex.html

Work through them one by one until something helps. If nothing does, post
back. The most common culprit is a corrupted Normal template or damaged
Preferences file.

 

[Jeff Dean]

Daiya, thanks. It turns out John was right, the problem wasn't in Word,
and it wasn't even in the suspect file either! I've identified the
problem as coming from Suitcase Fusion, which hadn't caused any trouble
until this week -- I'm using the most up-to-date version, but updated
it some while back, and I haven't changed any font assignments in it
for even longer. I notice that most of my inactive font sets have lost
all the fonts assigned to them, however; I don't know when that may
have occurred.

I have checked the integrity of the fonts I've been using in the
suspect document, both in Suitcase Fusion and in FontDoctor, both of
which give them a clean bill of health, so the problem is either with
some other corrupt font that I can't identify or with some other aspect
of Suitcase Fusion. Do you have any suggestions I might try? I should
say that I've got way too many fonts just to put them all in
~/Library/Fonts, and Apple's Font Book isn't adequate to my
requirements as a book designer and typesetter. Suitcase and Suitcase
Fusion have met my needs very satisfactorily up to now, so I want to
get this working again rather than simply to stop using SF.

 

[Jeff Dean]

Final update: The problem wasn't caused by Word or by the file or by
Suitcase Fusion, but by a corrupted Mac OS X font cache. Following
advice on the Extensis web site, I trashed the
/Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS folder, and that resolved my problem
completely.

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Final update: The problem wasn't caused by Word or by the file or by
Suitcase Fusion, but by a corrupted Mac OS X font cache. Following
advice on the Extensis web site, I trashed the
/Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS folder, and that resolved my problem
completely.

Actually, that same advice was on the Word Troubleshooting page that Daiya
sent you to yesterday. I guess you never got around to that one?

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/CorruptFontErrors.html

"Delete the System and User Font Caches

Quit all Office applications and drag the following files to the trash.
Reboot, and then empty the trash.

€ Com.apple.ATS.plist (Home/Library/Preferencess)
€ Com.apple.ATS/ (/Library/Caches)
€ FontTablesAnnex (/System/Library/Caches)
€ All other files whose names include .ATS or Font found in
/System/Library/Caches, especially com.apple.ATS.System.fcache and
com.apple.ATSServer.FODB_System

You can delete these files/folders yourself or use a third-party utility to
do it for you: Onyx (free), Cocktail, TinkerTool System, or Font Finagler
(shareware). Even if the application doesn¹t ask you to, you should reboot
immediately after deleting the system font caches."

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

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