Word 2000 Crashes - Troubleshooting

[AlDoman]

Computer is WXP Pro SP2, fully patched
White box PC, Pentium III/1000, 512MB RAM, 20GB hard drive (5GB free)

Problem product: Office 2000 Professional, patched to SP3a

Problem: Word crashes frequently, 10+ times per day. About half the time
it's in the middle of editing a document, the other half it's when trying to
exit the program. In every case the error trap "... has encountered a problem
and needs to be closed" with the option to send information to Microsoft over
the Web is presented. The user always opts not to send the information.

What has been tried so far:
- Error scan of hard drive using built-in XP error checking. No errors found
- Deletion of all temporary files in user's temp files folder
- Complete system scan with Trend Micro OfficeScan antivirus (up-to-date).
No viruses found
- Complete system scan with Ad-Aware SE Personal antispyware (up-to-date).
No malware found
- Ran the Detect & Repair function from Word's Help menu
- Ran a "Repair" re-installation of Office 2000 Professional
- Completely uninstalled, then re-installed Office 2000 Professional, and
reapplied all patches up to SP3a

The user's computer is otherwise running fine, there are no crashes with
other components of Office 2000 or with other user applications.

Can anyone offer any other troubleshooting ideas?

 

[garfield-n-odie [MVP]]

See http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/ProbsOpeningWord.htm .

 

[AlDoman]

Thanks for your suggestion. The document seems aimed at solving problems
where Word won't start at all, starts slowly or crashes when starting.
Although this computer doesn't show any of these problems I still went
through the document.

The only configuration settings that didn't match the recommended values
were related to the Startup Folder(s). The user had:

- Nothing in his personal Startup folder (Docs and Settings\...)
- In the "global" Startup (Prog Files\Microsoft Office\...) he had a .DOT
file related to Adobe Acrobat 4 (full version), and a .WLL file. There were
also some "temp" files (starting with "`" [tilde]).
- I deleted the temp files, then copied the .DOT and the .WLL files to his
personal Startup Folder

This seemed to "fix" the problem for about a day but it has started to recur.

Further information about the crashes:
- About 75% of the time it's when he's trying to open an existing document
- About 20% of the time it's when he's trying to close Word
- The remainder, Word crashes while editing a document

Further information about the machine/environment:
- The machine is a member of a Windows NT4 Server domain
- Most Word documents are stored on the server
- The TcpAckFrequency registry fix (value set to 1,
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328890 ) has been applied to fix the issue of
slowness when opening files in network folders that contain a lot of files

 

[garfield-n-odie [MVP]]

Did you try renaming the Normal.dot template?

 

[AlDoman]

Sorry to take a while to get back to you. It's taken a while to get the
change done, then to see if it worked.

It seems that renaming NORMAL.DOT has largely fixed the problem. It now
happens maybe once every couple of days, instead of numerous times per day.

Thanks very much for your help.