Edited a macro in normal.dot; Now Word Crashes on Startup

G

Gil Grissom

I have a peculiar issue with Word / Office XP version. I have a server
at home which acts as my repository for all my core data, and then I
have a laptop which I use as a workstation, synchronized to the
server; i.e. the default file locations for Word on the laptop point
to mapped drives which reside on the server.

I made a few changes to a macro in my normal.dot the other day, and
now, whenever I start Word, it immediately crashes. I tried deleting
normal.dot. No luck. I tried to make sure that no cached data was
being retained and that there was no change to the Word shortcut.
Still no luck. I tried to repair Office, no luck. I tried to Open and
Repair the normal.dot, no luck. I tried pointing Word back to local
directories; that didn't work. I tried to remove Office and
reinstall, still, the problem exists. It's almost like some other
files are screwed up, like, some shared dlls or something.
Essentially, Word will ONLY start in safe mode now and it tells me that
it is trying to recover the documents I was working on, however, it
never crashed while I was working on anything so I don't know what it
is trying to recover. If I say "No" that I don't want to start in safe
mode, it just continues to crash while starting and it asks me again
about starting in Safe mode. It's an endless loop.

Has anyone seen this kind of behavior? Is there a way to capture the
dump file that Word sends to MS so that I can look at it/print it
out/included it here? (I am refering to the info that is displayed
when you click to see what the report contains prior to sending it to
MS.)
 
G

Gil Grissom

Actually, I neglected to mention that I tried everything on that page
as well.

Word does startup just fine with the /a switch. So, yeah, it has
something to do with a corrupted add-in or template. However, how can
I remove all the add-ins and templates altogether? If I could do that,
I would add things back one at a time to isolate the issue.
 
J

Jay Freedman

Actually, I neglected to mention that I tried everything on that page
as well.

Word does startup just fine with the /a switch. So, yeah, it has
something to do with a corrupted add-in or template. However, how can
I remove all the add-ins and templates altogether? If I could do that,
I would add things back one at a time to isolate the issue.

The complete description of how to locate all the add-ins is in this
article:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011514521033.aspx
 

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