Office 10.1 apps crash when opening or immediately after saving

[Mike Calmus]

Word, Excel and PowerPoint have suddenly stopped working. Entourage
seems to work as well as ever. When I try to open any existing document
or if I create a new one and save it, the application crashes. The crash
dump indicates the crash is in com.apple.HIToolbox while calling
SetWindowProxyAlias.

I have tried removing all preferences (both manually and using the
uninstaller) and removing the actual Office folder and restoring from a
known good backup. The documents do not seem corrupt since I can open
them in other applications. I suspect something in the HIToolbox is
corrupt, but I don't really want to reinstall 10.3 (and all its updates)
from scratch just to fix a problem that only seems to affect these
programs. If there are any specific Apple files I should try restoring
from backup, I'm happy to try.

Any suggestions?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

It doesn't actually sound as though you have tried totally uninstalling the
program and then reinstalling it.

There are a number of Office troubleshooting suggestions here.
http://mcgimpsey.com/macoffice/office/troubleshooting.html

 

[Mike Calmus]

I hadn't explicitly followed these directions, but except for the Font
part, I had already done all of them. Still no luck. Any other ideas?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

You uninstalled using the Remove Office tool in the Value Pack, right? Then
you repaired permissions, reinstalled, repaired permissions again?

Have you tried it in a different user?

DM

 

[Mike Calmus]

Yep. I sure did. When I experienced a similar problem with Acrobat
Reader I determined it was an issue not with Office but with the OS
itself. Since the error was occurring in the HIToolbox and because I was
only having problems with Carbon apps, I decided to try replacing the
Carbon Framework with a known good copy. This fixed all the problems I
was having. Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

So you fixed it? Thanks for reporting back, very useful to know.
DM