Opening Word 2007

[Terry S]

Just upgraded to Vista and Office 2007 (1 of 15 in our office) and find it
impossible to open Word 60-70% of of the time. I navigate from the Windows
logo bottom left to Programs to Microsoft Office to Word 2007.
A dime Word background appears then immediately a window:
"Microsoft Office Word has stopped working. Windows is trying to recover
your information" - the window changes to...""Microsoft Office Word has
stopped working. Windows will close the program and notify you if there is a
solution - it freezes there so that the "Close Program button must be clicked.
Then a window appears with the full path and says the file cannot be found.
Try typing it in again correctly - although nothing was ever typed in.

I have uninstalled and installed the entire Office application several
times. My only solution is to keep trying until eventually it opens and then
never close Word.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Usual culprits are:

1. Corrupted Normal.dotm and/or Normal.dot. Rename them as
oldnormal.dotm/oldnormal.dot. (When upgrading to Word 2007, it reads and
uses an exsiting normal.dot, and creates normal.dotm.) You might need to
display hidden files/folders. In Vista on my machine, normal.dot? is located
here:

C:\Users\Herb\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates

YMMV...

2. Corrupted Word Data registry key. Rename or delete:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data

*Standard disclaimer: editing the registry can cause problems if you mess
up, and can destabilize the rotation of the planet. Proceed at your own
risk.*

3. Corrupted Windows user profile (gulp). Try creating a new Windows user
and see if the new user experiences the same problems.

Note: removing/reinstalling Office does not address any of these problems.
Office, bless its little heart, tries to preserve any existing user
settings. So, removing/reinstalling almost never fixes anything... unless
you insert "reformatting the hard drive" into the chain of events.

 

[Terry S]

Herb - you are a wonder - it appears that renaming the templates fixed my
problem - Thank you very much.

 

[Thomas]

Usual culprits are:
1. Corrupted Normal.dotm and/or Normal.dot. Rename them as oldnormal.dotm/oldnormal.dot.
C:\Users\Herb\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates
2. Corrupted Word Data registry key. Rename or delete:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
3. Corrupted Windows user profile (gulp). Try creating a new Windows user
and see if the new user experiences the same problems.
Herb Tyson MS MVP

Thanks Herb. I also had the the Stopped Working error with MS Word
2003.
Tried the Detect/Repair - Nada.
Tried renaming/deleting regisatry Data and Options folders. Nada.
Tried WinWord /a. Invalid option in 2003.
Tried finding addins, got lost. Too many places.
Investigated in Word SAFE mode. Nada. Desired options grayed out.
Reviewed start up path for junk. Empty.
Pondered many recent installs (X1, Visio, nVidia).
Reload system from True Image to work again but last image had
problem.
Reloaded earlier image. OK.

Then error returned at some point after I re-installed X1, Visio 2007,
and NewsBin. I then went to cut and paste some road maps for my
wife's early trip tomorrow. I had Word open and IE at Google maps.
While open, I then flipped monitor and set nVidia to roate the image
to match. I then set Word's printer margins to minimum by setting
them all to 0 and letting Word "Fix" them to actual printer's
minimum. I then tried to screen capture some vertical maps using the
Snipping Tool in Vista. I then started getting various app errors.
Desktop Manager errored out. PrtScr captured only black. Snipping
Tool crashed. Word acted strangely. Perhaps it was Word attempting
to change its display mode to match the new dimensions of the rotated
screen? I run at 1920x1200. So that changed to 1200x1920. Or maybe
it was the trick of setting margins to 0 that caused the DOT to be
redefined?

Anyway, I then was remiding of the long stading DOT corruption foible
and renamed it. Restarted Word. Ta Dah!

Productivity = 1 / (user expertise * application version level)

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

I'm glad you've got it sorted. One thing puzzles me, though... Running Word
with the /a switch has been valid in every version of Word that I can
remember. It works fine in Word 2003 (as well as in Word 2007). You can run
it using Start - Run, or you can run it by modifying an existing shortcut.
Make sure you include a space between winword or winword.exe and the /a
(i.e., winword.exe<space>/a, and not winword.exe/a).