Word 2003 freezes when typing

[miccro]

It's quite strange and new to me.
I have many documents of the same type, word2003 about 8 pages of length.
They all contain a table with two columns, first column timecode, second
column text (a sentence of 2 or 3 lines).
No problem until yesterday when one of those files froze up and Word said
"recover file". I tried all the options, I said yes, then no, then save,
then don't save. But what happens is that I am not allowed to type anything
in this document because it freezes and asks to recover.
So I retyped the hole document starting from a new empty document. When I
arrived at the last (YES!) page it froze and the story happened again.
Now I can open this doc, but as soon as I try to type a single character it
freezes.

Some of you has experimented the same thing?

PLEASE HELP !!!

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Are any other documents exhibiting this behavior? I can think of at least
two possibilities:

1. There is some combination of formatting/text etc. that's causing Word to
freeze. I have seen this on rare occasions in different versions of Word.
The "solution" generally is to keep dividing the document in half until the
the problematic bit is isolated/identified, and then change the way that
part is being done as a work-around.

2. The underlying document template has recently become corrupted, and this
corruption is being inherited by new documents created using it.

If you start Word in safe mode (press ctrl as Word is starting, then click
Yes to safe mode), does the problem still occur?

If you rename normal.dot (and the template that the document is based on, if
it's different from normal.dot), does the problem still occur?

If you'd care to send me one of the documents that are freezing, I can take
a look. If so, send to herb at herbtyson.com.

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Hi, Michele,

I spent quite a bit of time editing the document, arbitrarily adding Spanish
translations of the parts that were already in Italian and English, and
encountered no problems whatsoever. I tried editing in both Word 2003 and
2007. I can’t seem to make it freeze.

My first guess would’ve been that there was some kind of corruption in the
document, but I’m not encountering any problems at all.

Since you just began having problems recently, my first guess would be to
look to see if there are and Office or Windows updates you might’ve
installed right before the problem began. If so, can you uninstall those
updates

If not, my next suggestion would be to try Help – Detect and Repair. Since
the problem occurs even in safe mode, any Word problem would likely be in
the support files.

--
Herb Tyson MS MVP
Author of the Word 2007 Bible
Blog: http://word2007bible.herbtyson.com
Web: http://www.herbtyson.com