Word 11.1 hangs under OS X 10.4.1

[pwgallagher]

I have been using Word since Word X and OS X 10.2. without problems.
Now I find that Word is hanging for no obvious reason after an hour or
so of use (or sometimes more frequently).

It seems to stay hang-free for a while after deleting
com.microsoft.Word.prefs. I have checked (and rechecked) fonts in Font
Book 2 (validation). I've also experimented with deleting everything in
the ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft folder including the Office Font
Cache.

But the problem is returning now every day. I've notice a number of
reports of similar problems on e.g. the Apple discussion groups and on
MacOsX.com but no solutions.

Apart from the Tiger update, I've installed nothing that seems to
account for the problem. Has anyone here a similar experience? Or a
solution?

Peter

 

[Paul Higginbotham]

Yes, I have had the exact problem with Word 2004 under Tiger. Latest updates
installed, basically a very clean iMac, it is EXTREMELY intermittent. I'm
pulling my hair out MICROSOFT!! I paid a LOT of money on Word 2004 and Tiger
and now I'm getting the "Application not responding" at very random times. I
can't pin it down. PLEASE, PLEASE help Microsoft!!

Paul Higginbotham
(e-mail address removed)

 

[David McCowan]

I was able to fix the problem by going through my fonts and turning off the
majority of the foreign language typefaces. Have had no problems since.

 

[Paul Higginbotham]

Yeah, I tried that but it still crashes randomly.

Paul

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Paul:

Trust me, they would LOVE to help. They're still trying to figure out what
is causing the problem. It doesn't hit every user or every computer.
Frustratingly, there seem to be more than one cause, and some of them don't
appear in ANY of the computers in the Microsoft test lab!

The more detail you can give about your setup (and particularly, which other
applications you have running at the time) the sooner they will find it.

Cheers

Yes, I have had the exact problem with Word 2004 under Tiger. Latest updates
installed, basically a very clean iMac, it is EXTREMELY intermittent. I'm
pulling my hair out MICROSOFT!! I paid a LOT of money on Word 2004 and Tiger
and now I'm getting the "Application not responding" at very random times. I
can't pin it down. PLEASE, PLEASE help Microsoft!!

Paul Higginbotham
(e-mail address removed)

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[peter gallagher]

John,

I'd like to help Microsoft find this very frustrating bug too but I
don't know what I can send them. When Word hangs it puts nothing in the
Crash logs in /var/logs and there is no sign of any information in the
system console log.

Also WHERE do you send a support message. The support site in the Help
menu is the Windows support site. The Mactopia site contains no obvious
place to report continued crashes and there's nothing in the
'knowledgebase' that I can find on this problem with Office 11.1

Best wishes,

Peter

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Peter:

I answered your earlier.

Microsoft will see anything you post in this newsgroup (trust me: they're in
here nearly every day).

Or one of the MVPs will be happy to pass it on for you. No application will
issue an error report unless it "crashes". A weakness of personal computer
applications generally is that they do not have a "Dead Man Timer" such as
you find in mainframe software that times out and triggers a memory dump if
the thing hangs for an extended period.

Microsoft is still looking for the Tiger hang/crash problems -- they're not
entirely sure what the cause is yet. It appears to be some nasty conflict
caused by the way fonts are handled in Tiger. The reason you can't find it
in the knowledgebase is because they don't know exactly what's causing it,
yet...

Sorry

John,

I'd like to help Microsoft find this very frustrating bug too but I
don't know what I can send them. When Word hangs it puts nothing in the
Crash logs in /var/logs and there is no sign of any information in the
system console log.

Also WHERE do you send a support message. The support site in the Help
menu is the Windows support site. The Mactopia site contains no obvious
place to report continued crashes and there's nothing in the
'knowledgebase' that I can find on this problem with Office 11.1

Best wishes,

Peter

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Guest]

I'd like to help Microsoft find this very frustrating bug too but I
don't know what I can send them. When Word hangs it puts nothing in the
Crash logs in /var/logs and there is no sign of any information in the
system console log.

I haven't seen the first part of this thread. But when I installed Tiger
2 weeks ago (Quicksilver G4/867 SP), I switched back to Panther in
frustration after about one day. Word 2004 was hanging on launch with
cascading font-corruption messages (and they were bogus ones too). I got
it to launch all the way several times, usually after a fresh restart,
and it worked okay for a while, but one really cannot restart every time
one wants to open a program! Returning to Panther was unsatisfactory for
several unrelated reasons, so I switched back to Tiger within another 24
hours and worked out my problems with Word 2004.

In my case, I had some duplicate (uncorrupt) fonts in both Library/Fonts
and ~/Library/Fonts, about 15-20. The result of this (and I have NO idea
why this should be the result) was that when Word would get about 2/3 of
the way through my fonts, somewhere in the letter R, it would start
throwing off font corruption messages, EACH of which had to be dismissed
by hand. I have about 200 fonts installed, most of which I actually
need, and the rest of which are installed by Word or other software
(grrrr, what a terrible imposition on users!). I found this intolerable.

But there was light at the end of the tunnel: once I eliminated the
duplicate fonts and cleaned all the usual font cache locations, Word
2004 resumed launching without spurious corrupt font notifications. I've
been running it for about two weeks since then with no recurrence.

George

 

[Crito]

I too have been experiencing very unpredictable hangs with Word on my G
running at 1.3ghz with 896meg of RAM since upgrading to 10.4.1. Th
last one occurred after I'd been using Word for about two hours. I ha
just highlighted some text, and I think I hit apple-i to italicize.
was not using any other applications at the time, although Mail o
Safari (and some widgets) might have been running in the background.
recently made many fonts inactive (especially the foreign ones), an
verified all of my fonts with Fontbook.

For MS bug hunters, I have a sample of Word during my most recent hang
taken with Activity Monitor. If you'd like me to send it to you
contact me at (e-mail address removed)

 

[Marc Bizer]

I too have been experiencing very unpredictable hangs with Word on my G4
running at 1.3ghz with 896meg of RAM since upgrading to 10.4.1. The
last one occurred after I'd been using Word for about two hours. I had
just highlighted some text, and I think I hit apple-i to italicize. I
was not using any other applications at the time, although Mail or
Safari (and some widgets) might have been running in the background. I
recently made many fonts inactive (especially the foreign ones), and
verified all of my fonts with Fontbook.

The next time Word hangs, try this:

1) Launch Font Book, pick a font, and disable it ( Edit Menu, Disable
.... ).
2) Re-enable to go back to normal. However, as soon as the font is
disabled, Word should no longer be hung.

I'd be interested to know if that helps

--Marc

 

[Gusto]

I will try some of the suggestions on this thread. But I wanted t
contribute the observation that on my iMac G5, Word always hangs afte
I wake it up. At first I thought it was because I was connected to
network server and left a Word document open from the server. But eve
local docs on my hard drive will cause me to stare at the prett
rainbow wheel and finally have to "force quit" Word.

I'll give some of the font suggestions a try and see if that helps
Thanks