Word 2000 Crashes on XP Notebook

[Jim Breslauer]

I installed Office 2000 Pro on my wife's Dell Inspiron notebook, which
is running XP Home w/SP2. This machine has 2 user accounts - 1 for her
& 1 for me - & both are administrator accounts.

When she logs on under her account & starts up Word, it crashes almost
immediately with the "MS Word has encountered a problem & needs to
close" error message. It doesn't matter if she starts the program by
clicking on the program icon or by clicking on a document in Explorer.
The program crashes within seconds.

If she logs on under my account, she can use Word w/o any problem. She
can open, modify, save & print documents.

I've applied all available updates for Office 2000 (SP3 & subsequent
patches) & deleted all temp files. That didn't help. I also created a
new administrator account, thinking that this problem might be related
to file corruption at the user account level, but Word misbehaves
under the new account as well. I've swept her computer for spyware,
run a disk check & defragged her HD, but nothing helps. FWIW, she can
use Excel under her account w/o any problems.

I've installed this copy of Office on other multi-user XP machines w/o
difficulty. TIA for any suggestions.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Could be a problem with her Normal.dot or something in the Registry for her
profile. See http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/ProbsOpeningWord.htm

 

[Jim Breslauer]

Many thanks to the Microsoft MVP who replied to my OP. I inadvertently
deleted your post, so I can't thank you by name, but I'm nonetheless
enormously grateful.

As it happens, my problem was caused by a non-existent network printer
that was the default for my wife but not for me. After I changed her
default to the correct network printer, the problem went away.

I would never have figured this out on my own. Thanks again for your
fast, on-the-money response. I really appreciate what you're doing
here.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I think that might ultimately have been me, but I believe it was Beth who
shepherded you through the initial trials. I'm glad you got your problem
straightened out (and thanks for reminding me to add *printer* to the list
of factors!).