Word 2003 crashes constantly, file grows very large

[owczi]

Hi,

M girlfriend has a serious problem with Word 2003 (office 2003 SP1). She is
writing her thesis so it's quite important to find any possible solution.

The .doc file is quite small so far, about 40 pages and 300 kb in size, I'd
call it tiny. The text uses a massive amount of footnotes. Once in a while
(it might be two times a day or once every five minutes). Word simply crashes
(the windows with "send report" option), and the magic file recovery tool
starts, and the recovery results in insanely big file sizes (once it was 2
MB, the record was so far 80MB). When the option to show formatting
characters is turned on, tones of characters (something like spaces), and
also some parts of the original txt can be seen in the footnote area.

Does anybody have any idea what to do with it?
I have an Office 2000 CD lying around and Office 2000 has never faild me so
far, so I think I'll downgrade her Office for now.

Thanks for any help,

owczi

 

[Terry Farrell]

First I suggest making sure that both Windows and Office are patched fully
up to date.

Then check that the printer driver is the latest driver available and delete
and reinstall the printer.

Then with all applications closed, find the user's temp folder (usually in
Documents and Settings, Username, Local, Temp) and delete all the abandoned
temp files. You may need to reboot to get rid of them all. Not that this is
a temp folder and should be empty unless you are running an application that
needs temp files. Don't be shocked if there are thousands of abandoned files
there if it has never been emptied before.)

Then open Word and use File, Open to select the document: use Open and
Repair (the little arrow adjacent to the OPEN button).