Word 2008 crashing upon startup

[askora]

I have been having difficulty installing the 12.1.2 update to Office 2008 and
now I can't get word to work at all. I get the message: "You cannot install
Office 2008 12.1.2 Update on this volume. A version of the software required
to install this update was not found on this volume."

Entourace, Powerpoint, and Excel do not seem to be affected. I am running
Mac OS X 10.5.4

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[signal]

I have 12.1.2 installed, however I also get crashes on startup. Basically if you load in a document, and you try to do anything it will beachball and crash. For example if you try to scroll the doc. Its hard to tell when a doc is fully loaded, so I just load a doc and wait now like 60 seconds, that seems to help it, but in scrolling thru docs, navigating them, I get random crashes with Word 2008. Most of the documents I work on are in the 4-12MB range.

 

[askora]

I have 12.1.2 installed, however I also get crashes on startup. Basically if you load in a document, and you try to do anything it will beachball and crash. For example if you try to scroll the doc. Its hard to tell when a doc is fully loaded, so I just load a doc and wait now like 60 seconds, that seems to help it, but in scrolling thru docs, navigating them, I get random crashes with Word 2008. Most of the documents I work on are in the 4-12MB range.

My Word was crashing about 1 second after the document would appear no
matter what I did. If I tried to open any document or just start up the
program it would, as you put it, beachball and crash (I prefer to call it the
spinning wheel of doom). Thankfully I use Mac's Time machine. It was easy to
just 'drag-and-drop' the Word before the update and now everything works
fine. All my other Office programs are still in the 12.1.2 version except for
of course Word. I was basically having a panic attack when I posted this as
nearly all my classes depend on a solid word processor. Thanks for the quick
reply anyhow!

 

[CyberTaz]

Hello Askora -

I fear that what you've done is a transient & deceptive "fix" at best -
Office is a *suite* of applications which share much of the underlying
support application files & you now have Word out of synch with the rest of
the suite. This is quite likely to cause other problems, especially when you
attempt to apply any future updates.

See the information on this page for more appropriate & more permanent steps
to take in order to correct the type of issues you describe:

http://word.mvps.org/mac/Diagnose.html

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[askora]

Thanks for the tip CyperTaz.

Now that I am done typing my homework I can focus more on the long term
solutions. I have read of other problems after updating to the 12.1.2
version. At this point do you believe the best solution is to reinstall the
office suite? Before I even had any problems with Word, all of the office
programs had updated to 12.1.2 just fine. I checked in the About ____ button.
But I was still getting nagging auto update warnings about the 'critical'
12.1.2 update so I was quite confused. Finally I though I made an error and I
let auto-update do its thing and immediately after that Word stopped working.
All the other programs in the suite were fine. Do you have any other
solutions that could work besides reinstalling everything (and besides what
was on the website you sent)?

Thanks again for your help!

 

[CyberTaz]

Although it "may" come to doing a reinstall I wouldn't do so just yet... And
if you do wind up reinstalling it will have to be done in a specific way.

Try this & see how it goes [I'm assuming Word is at 12.1.1, right? If not
post back before proceeding - 12.1.2 definitely won't work if it isn't]:

1- Run Disk Utility - Repair Disk Permissions, then shut down your Mac -
don't just Restart.

2- Once you start up try applying the 12.1.2 update again. If it "takes",
repair permissions again & you should be good to go.

If the update *doesn't* take, see the following web page:

http://www.entourage.mvps.org/error/install_update.html#version_not_found

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac