Word closing down

[Bruce]

Since I installed Office Professional 2007 in January, I have had increasing
problems with Word shutting down when I try and save a document. To begin
with, I thought it was with personal templates I had imported from Office XP
but now it often closes down when I try and save almost anything,
particularly with 'save as'. Microsoft Office Diagnostics shows no problem. I
have set options to save as Word 2007 and Word 93-2007 documents to no avail.
Saving a document as a template also seems impossible. What can be causing
the problem?

 

[Graham Mayor]

See http://www.gmayor.com/what_to_do_when_word_crashes.htm then
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/ProblemsStartingWord.htm especially with
respect to the normal template and add-ins.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Bruce]

I have tried some of the suggestions in these links and so far they have not
helped though it will take me a while to work through all of them. One of the
MS second echelon help team has taken control of my computer and made a lot
of changes including changing normat.dot because of a problem with inserting
addresses from Outlook which I was eventually told was a bug which MS might
issue a patch for in time. Since the intervention by the MS team, things with
Word seem to have got worse. It has been suggested that I reformat my hard
disk which I dread but would reinstalling Office help, even though
diagnostics says there is nothing wrong? Would there be a problem with
re-registration?

 

[Graham Mayor]

Reinstalling Office won't make any difference whatsoever, and reformatting
your hard drive is simply overkill. Renaming your normal template, removing
any add-ins, renaming the Settings sub key of the Word data key in the
registry and even updating the printer driver will be more likley to effect
a cure and are covered in the links posted.

It is no good just trying a few of the suggestions and then giving up
because they haven't worked. You have to run through all of them until you
find which is the issue - and if Word crashes along the way, start again
with http://www.gmayor.com/what_to_do_when_word_crashes.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Bruce]

First, let me thank you for the helpful advice. Second, I wasn't giving up on
the other suggestions, I was just intending to work slowly through them and
with my level of expertise, I thought it would take some time. I therefore
did not want to leave acknowledgement of your advice for several days.
Renaming the normal template was done by one of the MS boys a few days ago
(amongst many other things). I have a normal11.dot as well as a normal.dot
and tried removing the former temporarily without effect. I also opened word
without templates as suggested in the article without benefit. I shall try
and venture into the registry and hope to report back if I may.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Normal.dot and especially normal11.dot are not involved (unless loaded as
add-ins). The default template for Word 2007 is called normal.dotm and it is
this one that needs to be renamed.

If by "opened word without templates" you mean you still have the same
problem when Word is opened in its safe mode (hold the CTRL key whilst
starting - and confirm your intention at the prompt) then the problems may
run deeper than those suggested fixes are capable of fixing.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Bruce]

I think it must have been normal.dotm that the MS expert must have renamed
but I will do it again. By opening without templates, I meant running
winword.exe /a, as suggested in the advice sheet. That didn't help but
running word in safe mode by holding down CTRL certainly seemed to stop a
crash which was occurring in normal mode, though I have not yet had time (I
am rather busy today) to try all the procedures which previously caused
crashes. This gives me encouragement. I can at any rate perhaps permanently
run Word in safe mode.

I will try fixing the registry, though the sheet does not give instructions
for Office 2007, only older versions, but I assume it is easily adaptable.

Sorry to be so ignorant but how do I identify the add ons I might delete?

 

[Graham Mayor]

The only thing you have to bear in mind for the registry changes is that
Word 2007 is Word 12.0. Substitute 12.0 in the registry paths where
described for the earlier versions i.e. rename (to oldData) or delete the
Data key -
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
with Word and Outlook closed.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Bruce]

I deleted the settings in the registry in data in Word 12, that did not work
and (before I got your reply) in Word 10 as well. Word still closes down when
I try and save, so next I'll get rid of the add ins if you could tell me
which and what.

 

[Bruce]

As a postscript to my last reply, when I renamed normal.dotm, it did not
reappear after reopening Word and the program still crashed, so I changed the
..old back to .dotm. The only normal templates in the folder after reopening
following renaming were normal.dot, normal11.dot and normalemail.dotm (and,
of course, normal.old). I'm in AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Templates, I hope
the right folder.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Create a temporary folder eg C:\Temp and move everything out of
AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Templates into that Temporary folder.
Word Options > Add Ins will indicate what addins you have loading. It seems
likely that one of them is incompatible and causing problems. Do you by any
chance have a version of Acrobat installed that is not at least version
8.1.2?

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Bruce]

No Acrobat. The addins: Scansoft Omnipage was present. I deleted that. It
made no difference. All the other addins appear to be from Microsoft: Active:
Person name. Inactive: CustomXML data,Financial Symbol, Headers,
footers,Hidden text, Measurement converter, Time. I emptied the Template
folder (including the subfolders Document Themes and Original Templates) and
restarted Word. I then tried to save a test document and Word immediately
closed down.

 

[Graham Mayor]

This is certainly a puzzle and I am fast running out of ideas. The fact
that it works in Safe mode suggests there is nothing wrong with the core
program. The problem is attributable to some external influence. All the
usual suspects have been suggested. Apart from re-installing the printer
driver, I cannot think of anything else that would fix it.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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