sudden problems with Word and Excel

[bebrokaw]

Twice now I have had sudden problems with Office 2002 programs. Word would close down if I used the bullets and excel would tell me the "disk was full" when I started to run it. Both times I was able to use the programs if I logged in as a different user. I ended up creating a new login for myself both times. There must be a reason for this problem and a better solution. I hope someone has some recommendations. Thanks

 

[Rob Schneider]

Sudden problems suggest sudden and recent changes which usually are by
nefarious programs like viruses, worms, trojans, and all other things
like this. It appears there are some such programs which like to make
user think that Office is not working. Check out your machine with up to
date anti-virus and anti-spy bot programs as a first step.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[bebrokaw]

Thanks for your reply but it still does not work. What confuses me is that I can log in to my computer as a different person and all the programs work just fine. When I use my login the programs do not work.

My assumption is that there are problems with some connections between my login name and the system. Any idea where the login information is stored so I can attempt to restore the old ones from my backup?

 

[Rob Schneider]

Something has apparently gotten corrupted or something. I don't know
why. Perhaps the way forward is to reinstall Office so that i has a
chance to refresh the files, settings and registry entries pretty much
automatically ... over-writing what the problem is. I'd like to know
the root-cause, but can't think of what it might be other than corrupted
caused by ??. Reinstall of Office at least might get you going.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Beth Melton]

If you are encountering errors when you use Bullets and Numbering in
Word then typically this is caused by corruption in the Registry. Exit
Word and in the Registry navigate to:

HKEY CURRENT USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Word\List Gallery
Presets

Rename the key in the Registry and Word will create a new one upon
starting.

If this resolves the problem then you can delete the renamed key.
Otherwise you can delete the new key and rename the old key back.

As always, prior to making any changes to the Registry you should
review "Backing up the Registry" and "Restoring the Registry" in the
Registry Help.

In this situation you may also want to use the Registry/Export
Registry file command and export your selected branch and then delete
it instead of renaming. That way if you find the change wasn't
necessary or incorrect, you can merge the deleted branch back to the
Registry by double-clicking the resulting file.

Regarding your Excel issue:

Try running Excel in Safe Mode. For this go to Start/Run and run the
following command:

Excel.exe /s

Note that there is a space before the forward slash.

If everything works fine in Safe Mode, then the problem could be due
to an add-in Go to Tools/Add-ins and uncheck all the add-ins. Then
start Excel without using the /s switch. If this solves the problem
then enable the add-ins one-by-one, restarting Excel each time, to
find the offending add-in.

If the problem still exists then go to Tools/Options/General and make
sure that the 'Alternate Startup file location' is blank.

If this doesn't work, move all the files out of C:\...\Office\XLStart.

This could also be caused by a bad xlb file. Search for files "*.xlb"
and move them to another folder..

--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

Twice now I have had sudden problems with Office 2002 programs.

Word would close down if I used the bullets and excel would tell me
the "disk was full" when I started to run it. Both times I was able
to use the programs if I logged in as a different user. I ended up
creating a new login for myself both times. There must be a reason
for this problem and a better solution. I hope someone has some
recommendations. Thanks