Spinning beach ball of death in word 2004 and OS X 10.4.2

[Thomas G. Madsen]

Hi,

It happens quite often, that Word 2004 (SP2) on OS X Tiger locks
up for several minutes and sometimes longer. I can't say why and
when it happens because almost everything can provoke it.
Just changing to another font or sending a document to print can
result in a spinning beach ball of death. It's really annoying.

I have deleted com.microsoft.Word.plist inside ~Library\Preferences
but unfortunately it didn't solve the problem, so what can I do?

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Thomas,

There is a known bug in MacOS that deals with fonts that can cause this
to happen. Apple and Microsoft are both aware of this and are trying to
fix it.

It wouldn't hurt to run Apple's Disk Utility and repair permissions and
to let a good disk utility such as DiskWarrior, TechTools Pro, or Drive
Genius have a look at your hard drive because system problems can also
result in the same symptom.

-Jim

 

[Thomas G. Madsen]

There is a known bug in MacOS that deals with fonts that can
cause this to happen. Apple and Microsoft are both aware of this
and are trying to fix it.

Okay and thanks for your reply, Jim. I hope they solve it soon.

It wouldn't hurt to run Apple's Disk Utility and repair
permissions and to let a good disk utility such as DiskWarrior,
TechTools Pro, or Drive Genius have a look at your hard drive
because system problems can also result in the same symptom.

It's a brand new Powerbook with no other problems than the
spinning beach ball in Word. I have repaired permissions but
haven't tried DiskWarrior yet. Maybe I should try it but must
admit, that I don't think that it will fix the Word problem,
when everything else seems to work just fine.

 

[Thomas G. Madsen]

Are you working on a network? By necessity, I occasionally work
with Word 2004 with a network home directory and Word can
sometimes run very slowly.

In this case I'm not working on a network. Not when it comes to
Word documents because they're usually stored on the Powerbooks
hard drive.