Freeze at "Optimizing Font Menu..." for all Office apps

[joshiz]

As of yesterday, all Office 2004 apps freeze at "Optimizing Font Menu
Performance". I can open all Microsoft Office X apps, so I am not sure
what the problem is.

I tried trashing all prefs, zapping PRAM, even trashing the whole
Microsoft Office 2004 folder and reinstalling...no luck.

While I can open all documents using Microsoft Office X, I did pay for
Office 2004 and would like to be able to use it...as of now I cannot.

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

Office 2004 is more sensitive to corruption than Office X. Since it freezes
on fonts, you should probably test your fonts by doing a bubble
search--remove half of them, see if problem happens. Test other half. Keep
testing half of the group until you've got it down to 1.

This KB articles has a procedure for dealing with problem fonts:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313535

Note that reinstalling without running the Office Remove Tool first (no
matter what manual trashing you did) is unlikely to help and can make things
worse.
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/RemoveReinstall.htm
(hit refresh a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)