Word 2000 (MS Office Home Personal Ed.) won't start - missing dll's

[Tom McCreadie]

This had been solid for a long time on 32bit XP SP3, with all usual
patches etc. . The other Office apps, Excel, Publisher etc still work
fine but Word now won't start up. The welcome screen freezes with 50%
cpu load.

The diagnostic utility 'Process Explorer' reports on this freeze:
"Warning: At least one delay-load dependency module was not found.
Warning: At least one module has an unresolved import due to a missing
export function in a delay-load dependent module.".

and
"Error opening file . The system cannot find the file specified (2).",
for the following 3 files:
WER.DLL
EFSADU.DLL
IESHIMS.SLL

Things I've tried, to no avail:
- repair of MS Office (but not full de-install / re-install)

- registry screening with Registry Mechanic and CCleaner

- Copying instances of the 3 missing dll files (borrowed from a friends
Win 7 pc) into the folders C:\Windows\system32 and, for ieshims.dll,
C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer. This just resulted in Process
Explorer reporting errors with a cluster of new dll file names. Maybe I
used inappropriate dll file versions?

I'm unsure exactly when this startup problem arose, as I had - gasp,
golly - not actually used Word for several weeks! But it may be tied in
with an IE8 update, or some issues I had with installing / de-installing
a trial version of PGP Desktop 10 ?

I have seen diverse web forum postings on such missing dll's, but
nothing quite matched my problem. Any pointers? Thanks.

Tom

 

[readonly]

Hi Tom,
Try a system cleanup at
http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/center/cleanup.htm
HTH.