Word 2007 has stopped working on Vista Home Premium

[Ako]

For the better part of a month, I have been trying to solve a sync problem
between my Smartphone (Cingular 3125) and my new pc (Dell XPS 410) that came
with Vista Home Premium. It worked (i.e. that is sync) the first day or so
and then never again until last night when Word 2007 (Office Standard 2007
Suite) was crashing so much that I did a repair from the control panel.
Suddenly I could sync again and then Word was working properly.

I returned home from the office today and I can still sync but Word is back
to where it has been for at least a week. I spent 3 hours on the phone with
Ms tech today and did look at the threads here but did not see this exact
problem.

For maybe 10 days, when I click on the shortcut icon on the desk there are
several times that Word will crash. If I tried to open a Word file, the
percentage of crashes goes up. The error messages are like this. First there
is a flash that says "Ms Word has stopped working" then the green bar with
the message working or checking for a solution. Then in a flash I see
another windows that says "Ms Office Trying to Recover".

That disappears quickly then a window remains with this message:
"Ms Word has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working
correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is
available." When I close this window, there is never a web page with any
solution.

Among those I talked to today, there was talk about Word, Outlook, Vista,
about uninstall and reinstalling everything, about conflicts with some of my
office software (esp Adobe products), suspicion about my firewall (NIS 2007)
which I often disable when testing out these issues, running in safe mode
and finding that it works okay that way, disabling everything in msconfig
but still several crashes.

Can anyone help me? I can't take another marathon phone call with tech
support passing me from one to anther and talking about schemes that would
virtually wipe away all my work of configuring this machine. I personally
wonder about some of the Windows updates since Word was fine until about 10
days ago and I think I was well past loading new software at that point.

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Jay Freedman]

The key statement is "running in safe mode and finding that it works
okay that way". When you run in safe mode, or if you launch Word from
a command prompt with the /a switch, Word doesn't load the default
template (Normal.dotm) or any add-ins from the Startup folder. It's
99.9% certain that the cause of the crashes is a corrupted or faulty
template or add-in.

Use the procedures at
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/ProbsOpeningWord.htm to figure
out which template or add-in is the culprit. Be aware that the article
was written for Word 2003 and earlier running on Windows XP or
earlier, so a few names are different -- you'll have Normal.dotm
instead of Normal.dot, and the path to the Templates and Startup
folders are different in Vista than in XP.

 

[Ako]

Thanks for taking time to help.

I had seen this document from a link in an earlier thread here. I am having
trouble making the translation from Xp to Vista. For example, when I search
the c drive of my pc, I get 128 normal.dotms but not a simple normal dot.
Has this been replaced by normal.ela?

I have run the firewall (NIS 2007) enabled and disabled. I have checked and
unchecked the box that runs Norton anti-virus for Word documents.

Word does not crash every time it is opened. When I click the desktop icon,
it is less than 50% crashes. When I first click on a file, it may be over
50% crashes. This morning it worked perfect until about 2 hours of use and
now I'm back to where I started.

I know how to work around these things, but I will be traveling for two
weeks and my spouse who teaches school would not have a clue what to do and
I find it hard to help by telephone. It would be nice to do a remote
operation of the pc, but I don't know enough about all the security issues
involved.

I don't have a network printer. My HP 7410 All-in-One is connected by a USB
cable.

I don't know how to find the startup folder in Vista.

There are a web add=ons like Adobe Acrobat creating pdfs, but I am most
suspicious that the normal file has been corrupted. Any change you can tell
me where to find that in Office 2007 Suite running on Vista?

 

[Terry Farrell]

The equivalent to normal.dot is normal.dotx in Word 2007. Make sure that you
have the latest driver downloaded from HP for your printer as that is one of
the causes of problems in Vista/Word2007.

To find anything in Vista, use its very powerful search. Click on the start
logo and the Start Menu pops up with the cursor already in the Search
dialog. Just type Start and it should pop up almost immediately. You can do
this for ANYTHING on your computer, not just applications or folders but
emails, contacts, whatever... (including normal.dotm, of course).

 

[Ako]

Thank you. Unfortunately, I still cannot find nrmal.dtx I thought I changed
the settings were no files would be hidden including system files but maybe
I failed to do so. At the moment, I don't remember how to do this.

I should also say that when I spoke of Word working in safe mode, I know
that the tech and I opened 15 files once Word was open and that we opened
Word from the icon and by first clicking on a file, but I don't think we did
several runs at trying to open file by clicking on a file.

Anyway, I would like to look at the normal.dtx file it you would tell me
where to find it.

In terms of HP, I called them and was told the only driver available now is
the one that comes with Vista. I was asking about some features missing from
the driver when the printer was on an Xp machine and they told me to sign up
for notification of release of this new driver. So yes I have the latest
driver as far as I know. I got another email from them two days ago and I
double checked the message and link and do not see any new drive for an HP
Officejet 7410 All in One.

 

[Terry Farrell]

You need to search for normal.dotm and you need to check search hidden files
and folders and non-indexed files option.

It is usually located in your user roaming profile in Vista. By default that
would be C:\User\username\appdata\roaming\microsoft\templates

Terry

 

[Ako]

Thanks. I did another advanced search for "everywhere" but again no such
file was found.

When I went to the folder you identified, I see normal.dotm but not normal
dotx

BTW, I don't know if this is a coincidence, but when opening a file with Ms
Explorer than than start/computer, Word seems less likely to crash. I
probably earlier said it was worse when I tried to open a file first than
using the shortcut icon on the desktop, but should have clarified that I
normally use start/computer rather than than windows/e (Windows Explorer) to
open these files. I have only tried windows/e a few times since noticing
this trend and so far
Word has not crashed.

 

[Ako]

I talked to a Ms tech by phone and he wanted to do a complete uninstall and
reinstall Office Suite 2007. I am 24 hours from 1 to 2 weeks of travel and
said there were not enough hours to get everything done.

But I also wonder if there is not a less invasive way to tackle this
problem. He thinks some of the files have been corrupted and even though we
have replaced the normal.dorm file and disabled NIS plug-in, etc., when we
did the repair (with the cd) he said that process would not catch all files
that were corrupt.

For him to walk me through a very clean uninstall and reinstall might be
like building a house, but to get my pc back to where it was will be like
rebuilding a city. Any suggestions?

 

[Terry Farrell]

If it is a corrupt file (as the MS Support suggests), then running Office
Diagnostics should catch and repair the corrupt file.

However, do you have a default printer driver installed? Have you checked
that it is up to date (the latest from the manufacturer)?

terry

 

[Ako]

I re-ran Office Diagnostics and again no problems are reported.

My printer is an HP Officejet 7410 All-in-One, but the driver is 6/06
(version 6.0.6000.16386) by Ms. I called HP and asked when they were going
to have an HP driver out since I was missing features of the driver that
worked with Xp. They said it was in the works and I signed up to be
notified, but no message nor did I find anything about a new driver for my
unit on their web yesterday. I have run the driver update, but it stays the
same.

The Ms tech also talked about Adobe and WP conflicts. I don't remember if
any of the Adobe products have had patched since they were installed, but
there was a Vista patch for World Perfect X3. I don't remember the timing,
but that was a few days ago.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Your correct in that HP has still not released the Vista drivers.

Did MS get you to test in safe mode? TO start Word in Safe Mode, press
WinKey+R top open the Run dialog and type in

winword /a

and press enter. Does Word open correctly now?

Terry

 

[Ako]

Yes, we used safe mode but our main test was to twice open 15 files in a
row. That works okay in the normal mode.

What we didn't do enough of is opening and closing using the desktop icon
and start/computer/double click file.

So, no there were no crashes in safe mode or when I tried /a but I have not
run all pertinent tests when doing so.

 

[Terry Farrell]

The problem is that you cannot open documents from Explorer or the desktop
and launch Word in Safe Mode. But I think you are on a red herring. I
strongly suspect the printer driver is the problem. I recommend that you
install a different printer driver, one that is known to work correct with
Vista/Word2007 before doing any other diagnostic work. The only printer
driver that I can personally state definitely works with that combination is
the Canon IP4200/5200 drivers. But I am sure that there others who have
thoroughly tested other printers successfully with this combination. I know
that the OfficeJet drivers are still only beta drivers from the Vista CD and
are not stable.

Terry

 

[Ako]

Sorry, but that driver drove my printer crazy. It started spewing out one
page after another with one line on each page and the characters were
nonsense.

 

[Terry Farrell]

I was not advising you to PRINT with a different printer driver - just
install a different printer driver, set it as Windows default and test to
see if Word is now stable. Of course you cannot print with it. All I intend
is to diagnose your instability problem with Word.

Terry

 

[Ako]

Sorry to have misunderstood your directions. I am out of state for a week
and will try your approach once I return home.

 

[Ako]

I haven't been able to test this several times, but after installing the
Canon 'printer' first things this morning, I have crashed twice among the
few times of going start/computer/double file.

So no joy here. I know you have said that uninstall/reinstall doesn't
usually solve these problems, but is that the case even if one did a
thoroughly clean uninstall including the registry and files on the hard
drive?

 

[Ako]

Don't know if this makes any difference, but due to the change in DST times
I was looking around to what had been automatically loaded in my pc in my
absence. Nothing, BTW, about DST and yet my pc and my phone both have the
right time and the same for the calendars in Outlook 2007 and my Cingular
3125.

Anyway, on 2/15/07, I installed Front Page 2003. The version I had was part
of Office 2003 Business Edition. In the program list of the control panel it
shows both of these. And I noticed that the automatic downloads include a
lot for Office 2003 including Word 2003 esp on 2/15/07. Now I have never
installed anything like Word 2003 (or Excel 2003, etc) on this Vista pc,
just Office Standard 2007 and then later FP 2003.

Any chance that these 2003 updates are causing problems? If so, how would I
go about trying to stop the problem.

On the other hand, if you still think that the printer driver is the issue,
then I guess my only solution is wait for HP to come out with a new driver
for my Officejet 7400. I checked their web again and it was not there.

I certainly don't want to uninstall/reinstall Office 2007 as that would be a
nightmare, but I need Word 2007 to be more stable.

 

[Ako]

Terry, can you help me?
I am out of town again for two days but got no relief this past week. I may
become so desperate that I do an uninstall/reinstall but at the end I think
that will only accomplish the undoing of all my configurations.

 

[Terry Farrell]

I am sure that this is some third party add-in that is causing the
instability and not Word. If it was stable in Safe Mode where all add-ins,
templates, macros, customizations and the printer driver are all bypassed so
that Word runs in its default install mode, it shows that Word is fine. I am
a bit concerned about 'Cingular 3125': what add-in has Cingular added? What
other add-ins do you have?

Terry