Spelling checker crashes Word 2004 on completion

[Matt Prather]

There is definitely something weird going on with the spell checker in
Word 2004 for Mac. The first time I saw this, I thought it was just
me, but I can reliably reproduce this 100% of the time, so it truly
does seem to be Word.

Whenever I run a spell check on a document in Word 2004, it does fine
until it finishes the check. At that point, I briefly see the
"wristwatch" (from earlier Mac OS versions!), then Word crashes ---
but quite helpfully offers to report the error to Microsoft, each
time!

This means that I basically have to remember whatever the last
spelling or grammar correction was to have been, and go in to make it
manually WITHOUT using the spell check tool, to avoid the crash.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Matt

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

Hi Matt,

You can try the standard troubleshooting techniques here, they fix a lot of
reproducible crashes.
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/TroubleshootingIndex.htm
(hit refresh a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)

Likelihood is it's a problem with Word on your machine, but not necessarily
inherent in Word on every computer.

A guess--when you get to testing the preferences files, also test the Custom
Dictionary, which is kept in the same location. Conceivably a corrupt
custom dictionary could be causing such a crash.

DM