"Microsoft Office Word has stopped working"

[Terry Farrell]

So to summarise, all is OK if only one document is opened, but it stops
responding if you have two documents open and try to save either. Also,
opening and creating a new document from the blank normal will also stop
responding if you try to save it.

OK. Please try the following test in Safe Mode. From Start, Run, type in

winword /a

and press enter. Word will open in its default install mode to a blank
document. Add a little text and see if you can save it now. What happens?

If it is OK in Safe Mode, it suggests a corrupt normal.dotm. Go to your
Template folder and rename normal.dotm to normal.bad. If you find a legacy
normal.dot, rename that as normal.rot. Any abandoned temp versions you see
(they will usually start with a ~), delete them too. Then test Word again.

Terry

 

[Steve Mencik]

To summarize, all is well if I open one document by double-clicking on the
document so that Word opens and fetches that document automatically. If I
open Word first, with a blank document, and then try to open an existing
document it crashes.

I think I already posted this, but I have opened Word by going to the Run
line and putting in "winword /a" and I get the same response. It opens with a
blank document, but when I try to Open an existing document, the Open
dialogue appears and Word crashes, just like when starting Word the normal
way.

If I open in safe mode and type some text and try to save, I get the
dialogue open and then a Word crash, just like when starting Word without the
"/a".

Note that I have already uninstalled Office, deleted any remaining files
that l could find that looked like Office files. When into the registry and
search for Office keys, deleting anything and everything I could find,
rebooted, used UniBlue's product to clean and repair registry, and then did a
clean install of Office 2007 Home and Student.

I have these problems as soon as it starts.

I suspect some other underlying error, as this started back in October when
the machine was still using Office XP. When I couldn't correct the error
then, the online troubleshooting noted that Office XP was supported and to
upgrade to Office 2007. So I did. I completely uninstalled Office XP before
installing Office 2007, but the errors have not gone away.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Did you go to your Template folder and rename normal.dotm to normal.bad. If
you find a legacy normal.dot, rename that as normal.rot? Any abandoned temp
versions you see (they will usually start with a ~), delete them too? The
template folder is usually in Username/App Data/Roaming/Microsoft/Templates
folder.

In Windows Explorer, check that you don't have any legacy or dead drive
mappings set up.

Check in Macros on the Developer Ribbon to make sure that no macros are
installed - especially any AutoSave or similar name macros.

Terry

 

[Steve Mencik]

I know I got rid of normal.dot, but not sure of normal.dotm. I'll have to
check that the next time I get to the church to work on this. Hopefully I can
stop there on the way home from work this evening. I'll check for abandoned
temp files and get rid of them, if any, too. I forgot that the suffix
changed from .dot to .dotm when Office 2007 came out.

There are no bad drive mappings in Explorer, and I've already looked at the
Macros area too. It is empty.

I'll post again when I get to check the norma.dotm and abandoned template
files.

SM

 

[Terry Farrell]

OK. I'll wait for you to check it out.

Terry

I know I got rid of normal.dot, but not sure of normal.dotm. I'll have to
check that the next time I get to the church to work on this. Hopefully I
can
stop there on the way home from work this evening. I'll check for
abandoned
temp files and get rid of them, if any, too. I forgot that the suffix
changed from .dot to .dotm when Office 2007 came out.

There are no bad drive mappings in Explorer, and I've already looked at
the
Macros area too. It is empty.

I'll post again when I get to check the norma.dotm and abandoned template
files.

SM

 

[Steve Mencik]

Terry,

I did a search for all normal.* files and renamed them.
I searched the templates folder and found no abandoned templates.

I double checked the drive mappings and macros area just to be sure.

I tried both winword /a and winword /safe, and had same issues both ways.

I looked in the application event logs and found a fairly consistenet error
message:

Faulting application WINWORD.EXE, version 12.0.6331.5000, time stamp
0x48fa27b4, faulting module PROPSYS.dll, version 7.0.6001.16503, time stamp
0x483b9976, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x00006dd2, process id
0xf40, application start time 0x01c95d30b6b8bf00.

Of course, that message is meaningless to me, perhaps it has some meaning to
you.

I even made sure to disable Norton anti-virus while I was doing all this,
just to make sure that was not interfering.

Any further ideas?

 

[Terry Farrell]

Propsys.dll is a Windows file picker library file. If you double-click a doc
in Explorer, it will open OK in Word as Propsys is not used. If you Open
Word and then use File Open to select a document, Propsys is used.
Propsys.dll must be corrupt. You should also get the same problem if you run
Excel and try opening to edit an xls.

You may be able to resolve this by inserting your Windows installation disk
and choosing the Recovery Console and running Repair. However, you will get
better qualified advice by posting the question a Windows Newsgroup.

Terry

 

[Steve Mencik]

Terry,

Thanks, I will try the other group. It must be something within the O/S, as
I downloaded and installed OpenOffice, thinking that would be at least a good
temporary solution. It gets exactly the same error.

I've replace propsys.dll and propdefs.dll from a clean system, and that
didn't seem to help.

Steve Mencik