MS Word 2002 freezes on certani documents

[Darren Amundson]

I use MS Word 2002. I am having a problem opening certain
MS Word documents. Each day, I recieve about 25 files
from someone. They are all created and saved by the same
person using Microsoft Word 9.0. I can usually open the
files sent by this person. However, every once in a
while, one or two of the files causes my MS Word 2002 to
freeze. I then need to end the MS Word application. The
problem documents seem to open normally, but then I get an
hourglass and the program no longer responds. I tell the
person who sent these to me about this, but they say there
is nothing different about those documents that cause my
Word to freeze. Also, a colleague of mine, who uses Word
2000, can open those same documents without any problems.
If I send the document to another user of MS Word 2002,
that person will also be unable to open the document. I
wish I knew what I could do to solve this problem. I
already checked and added all of the MS Word updates from
this site.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Is there someone at Microsoft that I can send the MS Word
document to and they could tell me what is wrong with it?

 

[Klaus Linke]

[...] I recieve about 25 files from someone. [...]

[...] every once in a while, one or two of the files
causes my MS Word 2002 to freeze. [...]

Hi Darren,

It's easy for files to get damaged when you send them as email attachments.
I've seen lots of cases where stuff was missing or damaged even in plain
text files.
Word will often choke when you feed it a damaged binary *.doc file, and
even if it does recover, the corrupt document can cause problems down the
line.

Ask your colleagues that send you the files to zip them up.

Compressed files are less likely to get damaged in my experience (perhaps
because the mail programs recognize them as binary files, and treat them
different than text files).

And if they do get damaged, you will be warned when unzipping them (because
zipped files contain a check-sum).

Regards,
Klaus