word freezes upon opening

[marcsoup]

I have a new macbookpro with OSX 10.5.5 - I have installed Office 2003
and it's been fine until yesterday when I was cleaning out some old
emails in Entourage using the mail filter and when it had deleted a
bunch of mails I took off the filter and the inbox despite having over
7000 mails in would only display 1 mail. Then, today I ws working in
Word - all good. Shut down and tried to reload my Word Doc from the
Word file and it asked me if I wanted to use recovery to recover the
file - I said yes but the file came back scrambled and locked, after
that even starting Word it went to the template screen and just froze
every time. I tried launching Entourage again after this and it
wouldn't go past the title screen. Any ideas?

 

[John McGhie]

First, let's go for the simple fix. In Entourage, check your View settings
to make sure that you have not inadvertently left "Unread Only" turned on,
or something simple like that.

My next idea is to ensure that you have applied ALL the most recent updates
to the system.

Start with Apple: Go to the website and download their most recent Combo
updater and run it, followed by any patches they have released since.

Then go to the Microsoft site and do the same.

Then run Disk Utility and Repair Permissions.
Then hold down the Option key when you start Entourage, and when it prompts,
tell it to rebuild your database.

I suspect that the root cause of the issue is that your Entourage database
has corrupted. Which should not have happened if your updates had been
up-to-date. Word won't start if the Entourage database is bad.

Now: you should NEVER leave 7,000 emails in your Inbox. Doing so will not
only make Entourage very slow, it will also lead to a lot of churning in the
database and cause it to fail soon and often.

Create folders "On My Computer" and move all those "kept messages" into
them. Try to keep less than 20 messages in your inbox, just the ones you
are currently working on.

And if you are running any utilities that promise to make your computer
"faster" by 'removing the things you don't need' -- get rid of them.
Neither Apple nor Microsoft install anything you do not need sometime.
These utilities create mayhem by removing modules that are never called
unless the system is trying to recover from a problem. They make the system
faster alright -- they turn a "small glitch" into a "major disaster" --
INSTANTLY!

Hope this helps

I have a new macbookpro with OSX 10.5.5 - I have installed Office 2003
and it's been fine until yesterday when I was cleaning out some old
emails in Entourage using the mail filter and when it had deleted a
bunch of mails I took off the filter and the inbox despite having over
7000 mails in would only display 1 mail. Then, today I ws working in
Word - all good. Shut down and tried to reload my Word Doc from the
Word file and it asked me if I wanted to use recovery to recover the
file - I said yes but the file came back scrambled and locked, after
that even starting Word it went to the template screen and just froze
every time. I tried launching Entourage again after this and it
wouldn't go past the title screen. Any ideas?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]