word 2002 crashes repeatedly

[Steve Heimlich]

I have a few documents which I edit (one in particular
tonight) which cause Word 2002 on Win2000 to crash
repeatedly and submit error reports. Crashing seems to be
related to Word's opening the document and then something
happening (e.g., hitting "return", typing a single
character, doing a bit of light editing, but nothing
particularly complex). Word recovers the document and
brings it up again, but then it crashes again within about
30 seconds of its coming up.

Word sent about 15 reports to Microsoft with this error
tonight before I gave up and switched to OpenOffice 1.0.1,
which worked just fine on this doc.

According to Windows Update and Office Update sites, I'm
completely current on win2000 and on Office.

I've seen this sort of bug before, which renders Word
useless and requires OpenOffice or StarOffice to continue
working. It's also been reported (at least by me) before
using Microsoft's automatic bug sending tools (as above).

So obviously this is a vague bug description and I don't
expect anybody to troubleshoot from this, but given the
previous reports (presumably which contained useful
information) and the bug's recurrence, I'm curious if
folks know if Microsoft really does much with these bug
reports or if they're just filed somewhere? Clearly the
reports don't trigger any follow up from Microsoft with
its customers, not that I'd expect any. At least
OpenOffice does work in this case and I can therefore
continue with my work. My colleagues all have to switch
to OpenOffice as well at this point (not that that's a bad
thing, but it's a distraction).

Steve

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If this happens with specific isolated documents, the most reasonable
conclusion is that the specific documents are corrupt. See
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word

 

[John Lindner]

I have similar problem. I saw something about it on the
Web once and was too busy to deal with it. Now wished I
had not bypassed it. My Word 2002 running on XP Home just
up and "disappears." The one phrase I saw earlier was
that this happens when minimizing Word and then trying to
bring it back up again. This morning my entire Word
disappeared--including three or four open documents. Kind
of hard to write a book when the chapters keep
disappearing! If you find a solution please let me know.
All I see on this website is people asking for help. Does
anybody ever get any?
John

 

[Steve Heimlich]

Well, the corrupt documents work just fine in OpenOffice,
so my assumption is that MS Word is actually the culprit
and not the document, which was written originally in MS
Word.

Are there known bugs where Word corrupts its own files
such that it can't open them but OpenOffice can? The web
page referenced below seems to indicate that users should
just expect Word to corrupt its own files if using certain
features (e.g., versioning). That sounds like a pretty
obvious bug and it would be good to know if MS is working
on fixing this kind of thing. As posted previously, Word
seems to be able to recover the file after crashing, so
one would think it could fix its corruption problem.

Also, what happens with those bug reports which get sent
to Microsoft automatically? Is there a way to get any
sort of response from Microsoft for those that folks know
of?

Thanks, Steve