Word 2004 (and Entourage) problems since Tiger Upgrade

[NeilW]

Hello,

I've been using Word 2004 since it came out without problems. In fact
the entire Office suite has been in my experience rock solid. That is
until I upgraded to Tiger. Since upgrading to Tiger I have had HUGE
problems with Word, and some annoyances with Entourage.

Let me start with Entourage as the problem is simply that I get the
SBOD (Spinning Beachball of Doom) frequently and Entourage just hangs
for a minute or so before coming back to life. While not critical,
this is annoying.

Now the word problems are more frustrating (and down right annoying).
I get a similar SBOD problem except the software never recovers. I get
a Not Responding error from the Force Quit menu. In addition, I
frequently try to open a file (often from an Entourage Attachment but
also from my desktop) and get a message that the file is corrupt.

Here is what I have found/tried so far:

1. It turns out the files are not actually corrupt. If you tell Word
to try to recover the file when prompted, the file will turn out to be
severly corrupted - seeing field codes instead of formating etc...
However, if you say do not try to recover, quit word and try again -
the file will almost alway open up without problem (and without any
sign of corruption).

2. I have deleted all Office preference files without success.

3. I have used several utilities to check for damaged or problematic
fonts.

4. I have tried logging in as a "safe user" and had the same problems.

I'd really appreciate some help on this as I've lost a lot of work this
way where Word just hangs on me. Usually I can recover most of the
file, but not everything and not all the time.

Just to add some extra info that may be helpful in the diagnostic:

- I'm running Tiger (and have updated to 10.4.1)
- I'm running Word 2004 version 11.1 (040910)
- I'm using a G4 (1.25GHz) 15" Powerbook with 1GB of RAM and have
around 15GB free on my harddrive.
- I have Endnote 8.0 installed on my computer and it is linked to Word.

Thanks in advance,

Neil

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Re Entourage beachballing--it might be the problem of Spotlight trying to
index the Ent database. You should add the Ent Identities under Privacy in
System Prefs, Spotlight.

Re Tiger/Word hangs--haven't a clue. A lot of people are suffering and I
don't think there's any fixes/workarounds known yet. Sorry.

 

[NeilW]

Hi Daiya,

Thanks for the tip on Entourage - I've tried adding the Ent Identities
under Privacy and hope that will work.

As for Word...I'll keep trying - it's getting worse though.

I saw on another thread a suggestion of disabling a font and
re-enabling it to get Word to come back to life but sadly that did not
work either.

Thanks again,

Neil

 

[NeilW]

Hello again,

One other thing I forgot to mention that I tried - I re-verified (and
fixed) all permissions on my system. That too however has failed to
fix the problem.

Neil

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Neil:

Search this newsgroup, and try everything you see.

It's "duplicate fonts" that's doing it. If you can remove your OS 9 fonts,
you may get enough stability to work with.

There's a complex process of deleting font caches but not emptying the
trash, then rebooting, then emptying the trash that works for some people.

Make sure you have applied MS Office patch 11.1.1
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=/mac/down
load/office2004/update_11.1.1.xml&secid=4&ssid=14&flgnosysreq=True>

Hope this helps

Hello again,

One other thing I forgot to mention that I tried - I re-verified (and
fixed) all permissions on my system. That too however has failed to
fix the problem.

Neil

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[NeilW]

Hi John,

Wow - it may have worked - not 100% sure yet - but two days with no
problems is pretty much unheard of for me since the Tiger switch! I
tried both your suggestions (sadly at once so I do not know which one
worked) but one of them (or the combo) did the trick.

Thanks a tonne,

Neil

 

[Ron Stephens]

It's "duplicate fonts" that's doing it. If you can remove your OS 9 fonts,
you may get enough stability to work with.

I was skeptical, but this turned out to be the problem for me. I
meticulously compared all font libraries and found 1 duplicate font -
Arial was in the main library & my user librariy. Once I trashed the
duplicate and restarted I haven't had a single hang in Word.

Why is it always the user's fault?

 

[TeddyC]

Ron,

Sorry to be daft, but which of the two Arials did you delete? (I've got
two, too.)

Ted

 

[TeddyC]

Ron,

Sorry to be daft, but does it matter which duplicate font you get rid
of--the main library font or the user font?

Ted

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Ron,

If you use FontBook (in your Applications folder), it will decide for you.
Just use the "Resolve Duplicates" function. That will disable one of the
dupes, which you can then trash or leave where it is.

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
MacOffice MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
(If using Safari, hit Refresh once or twice ­ or use another browser.)
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

To have the advantage of the Unicode features of Arial in Office 2004 you
should keep the copy in your user Library, which was put there by Office
2004 (or X) - NOT the one in your root Library, which is probably a lot
older, likely put there by Internet Explorer or some other app quite a while
ago.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[TeddyC]

That fixed the problem for me, Beth, and was very easy, too.

Thank you!

 

[Ron Stephens]

Sorry to be daft, but which of the two Arials did you delete? (I've got
two, too.)

I don't think it matters. I chose to delete the one in my user library.

 

[Ron Stephens]

If you use FontBook (in your Applications folder), it will decide for you.
Just use the "Resolve Duplicates" function. That will disable one of the
dupes, which you can then trash or leave where it is.

Fontbook never revealed the dupe. That's why I did it the hard way.

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

I don't think it matters. I chose to delete the one in my user library.

Wrong one. it does matter.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[NeilW]

Well unfortunately that was short lived. It worked great for a while
but now it is worse than ever. I've stripped my machined down to only a
small handful of fonts and it's still a problem.

One thing I have found though - is that the problems with Word and
Entourage are much more likely to happen if both programs are running.

Excel and Powerpoint are starting to go south on me too.

Oddly they are the only programs giving me problems since the Tiger
upgrade. Everything else works flawlessly so far.

If Pages was not sooooo slow I might consider using it for now but it's
not really an option.

Neil

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Yeah, this is very frustrating. Either Apple or Microsoft need to issue a
patch to fix the problem, and currently they are having difficulty finding
the precise cause...

Well unfortunately that was short lived. It worked great for a while
but now it is worse than ever. I've stripped my machined down to only a
small handful of fonts and it's still a problem.

One thing I have found though - is that the problems with Word and
Entourage are much more likely to happen if both programs are running.

Excel and Powerpoint are starting to go south on me too.

Oddly they are the only programs giving me problems since the Tiger
upgrade. Everything else works flawlessly so far.

If Pages was not sooooo slow I might consider using it for now but it's
not really an option.

Neil

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Chris]

Hello;

I am having the same problem with the beachball of doom appearing
occasionally in Word. Two questions:
(1) Could someone please walk me through exactly how I resolve the
fonts issue? I went to FontBook, selected all the fonts, clicked
"resolve duplicates" and nothing really seemed to happen. Is there
something else I should be doing?
(2) Whenever I start my computer after I've been working on Word, it
has files in the trash labeled "word work file such and such." This
was not something that happened with the previous Mac I had, but the
Mac before did this and I don't believe it was good sign. Is this
somehow related? Is there a way I can get rid of these work files?
What are they?

Thank you!!

Chris

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I can't help with the beach ball/tiger/font problem, sorry.

(2) Whenever I start my computer after I've been working on Word, it
has files in the trash labeled "word work file such and such." This
was not something that happened with the previous Mac I had, but the
Mac before did this and I don't believe it was good sign. Is this
somehow related? Is there a way I can get rid of these work files?
What are they?

But you don't need to worry about this second problem, I don't think. Word
*always* creates those files in the same folder as the doc. I think they
are the stack of temporary files required to maintain the Undo list, but
they are definitely a fundamental part of how Word operates. When you close
a doc, Word is supposed to get rid of them, so them showing up in the trash
makes a lot of sense. (When Word use to crash on my OS 9, they always got
stuck on the hard drive with my doc).

One other person reported this as well, by the way. I'm guessing based on
zero knowledge that Tiger changed something about whether these files are
invisible.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Chris,

Hello;

I am having the same problem with the beachball of doom appearing
occasionally in Word. Two questions:
(1) Could someone please walk me through exactly how I resolve the
fonts issue? I went to FontBook, selected all the fonts, clicked
"resolve duplicates" and nothing really seemed to happen. Is there
something else I should be doing?

When you have duplicate fonts, you will see a black dot to the right of the
font name in Font Book. When you select one of those fonts, go to the Edit
menu and click on "Resolve Duplicates", and the black dot will disappear.
If you then click on the expansion arrow next to that font name, you'll see
that the duplicates are grayed out with the word "off" next to them.

However, I just selected *all* of my fonts and found that "Resolve
Duplicates" was grayed out, meaning it's inactive; so I don't know how you
could have done this successfully. You have to do it one font at a time.
Also, it's best to do this when Word is quit and then relaunch when you're
done so it can rebuild its font cache.

(2) Whenever I start my computer after I've been working on Word, it
has files in the trash labeled "word work file such and such." This
was not something that happened with the previous Mac I had, but the
Mac before did this and I don't believe it was good sign. Is this
somehow related? Is there a way I can get rid of these work files?
What are they?

Word's work files are created so that Word can keep track of your actions so
that if you hit "undo" it knows what to go back to, for instance. When you
close a document, all the work files are trashed. In Panther, this all
happens behind the scenes but it seems that in Tiger, the files are visible
in the trash. This is nothing to worry about. Just go ahead and empty the
trash periodically.

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
MacOffice MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
(If using Safari, hit Refresh once or twice ­ or use another browser.)
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>