Word has stopped working

[Jerry]

Every time I close Word after telling it I didn't want to save my changes I
get a message that "Microsoft Word has stopped working" followed by a
restart. If I close without making any changes or save my changes there is
no problem. I just went from XP to Vista and did not have this problem on XP.

 

[Terry Farrell]

You have an HP printer? Unfortunately this is HP's fault. Please report it
to them to see if they have a viable solution, but probably not.

What you will have to do is set a different printer driver as your Windows
Default printer and only switch to the HP printer when you need to print.
Next time, purchase a Canon - vastly superior and cheaper to run.

 

[Jerry]

To be fair it is an old HP LaserJet 1000 that doesn't have a Vista driver so
I'm not ready to dump HP but thanks for the reply. It did work.

 

[jmh]

I have the following printer drivers in my Vista (using MS Office 2007):

- Brother DCP-315CN USB
- HP Laserjet P2015 Series PS
- Xerox Global Printer Driver PS
- Microsoft XPS Document Writer
- Fax
- Microsoft Office Document Writer
- Send to OneNote 2007

the last four of which came with the MS software and the first three are
installed by me.

When I open certain files and close Word without making any changes an error
message telling that "Word has stopped working" appears after a while.
Sometimes Word restarts automatically after the error message. One of the
files that seem to cause this situation is an RTF file created by Word 2004
for Mac others are docx files created by Word 2007 in Vista. In some mystery
way this seems to have something to do with the files I open.

In addition, the default printer seems to have an influence too. All the
"real" printers I have (Brother, HP, Xerox) make this happen. So, HP seems
not to be the only bad guy of the story. And what is strange (or is it?) the
Microsoft XPS Document Writer driver seems to belong to that group as well.
If one the three other "virtual" drivers is selected as a default printer.
The problem doesn't occur.

I used to use Mac before but unfortunately the "corporate policy" made me to
change to Microsoft. With Apple I never ran into this kind of difficulties.
You can easily say, it is HP's, Brother's or Xerox's fault, but why such
problems doesn't occur with Mac OS, and who has written the Microsoft XPS
Document Writer driver?

To be fair it is an old HP LaserJet 1000 that doesn't have a Vista driver so
I'm not ready to dump HP but thanks for the reply. It did work.

 

[Guest]

Well there may be a little more to this than first supposed as some users
have found that having vestiges of an unused (HP) printer in the registry
cause the close problem too. But without having a system to test this with,
I am unsure how or why this should happen. My point is that it MAY still
only be the HP printer that is causing the problem but proving that may be
rather time consuming.