Word keeps crashing! Any suggestions, please??!?!?!?

[TechnoBoy]

I have a client who has had Office X for the last several months, but
is just now experiencing a recurring crashing problem. They're
running on an eMac with 1 GB of RAM running OS 10.2.8. I wish I had
more information than that, but apparently, the crashes happens at
random, with no apparent correlation to any programs currently open or
to login items running in the background.

I have tried the following:

1. Repair permissions.
2. Removing and re-installing Word (For some reason, the "remove
office" app on the Office CD-ROM doesn't completely work, as it fails
to trash the Microsoft Office folder in Applications, so I've had to
trash the folder manually. I also deleted any microsoft plist files
that were left behind, and the Microsoft Office Identitied folder that
was left in the documents folder).
3. Ran Tech Tool pro and did a complete check of the hard drive
(except for a surface scan - would have taken too long). No errors
found.

Is there anything else I should look at? I already have the client
checking to see if it's an issue with his particular user account, and
to see if it's only Word that's having the problem, rather than other
Office apps.

Again, I wish I had more information as to the steps to repeat the
problem. As I get more information, I will definitely post it here.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I have a client who has had Office X for the last several months, but
is just now experiencing a recurring crashing problem. They're
running on an eMac with 1 GB of RAM running OS 10.2.8. I wish I had
more information than that, but apparently, the crashes happens at
random, with no apparent correlation to any programs currently open or
to login items running in the background.

I have tried the following:

1. Repair permissions.
2. Removing and re-installing Word (For some reason, the "remove
office" app on the Office CD-ROM doesn't completely work, as it fails
to trash the Microsoft Office folder in Applications, so I've had to
trash the folder manually. I also deleted any microsoft plist files
that were left behind, and the Microsoft Office Identitied folder that
was left in the documents folder).
3. Ran Tech Tool pro and did a complete check of the hard drive
(except for a surface scan - would have taken too long). No errors
found.

Is there anything else I should look at? I already have the client
checking to see if it's an issue with his particular user account, and
to see if it's only Word that's having the problem, rather than other
Office apps.

Again, I wish I had more information as to the steps to repeat the
problem. As I get more information, I will definitely post it here.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

If Remove Office isn't removing Office, I would suspect that permissions
have been fouled up. Run the Disk Utility from the
Applications/Utilities folder. Click on the HD icon, then select First
Aid and click on Repair Permissions.

Note that, AFAIK, the account must be an administrator account for
Remove Office to work. I suspect you would have gotten an error message
to that effect if that was the problem.

 

[TechnoBoy]

Thanks, but if you had completely read my original post, you would
have found that the first thing I tried was to repair permissions, as
you had indicated. This did not resolve the issue, not did it allow
me to remove Office using the "Remove Office" app on the original MS
Office CD.

Any other ideas?

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Recurring crashing is usually:

1) Corrupt Normal template

2) Corrupt preferences

3) Bad file permissions

4) Corrupted fonts.

There's a procedure on www.word.mvps.org in the Mac section for trying to
sort it out.

First you have to decide whether the Remove Office Tool actually worked or
not. If it didn't, then you have to do the steps by hand. That's because
we rely on Remove Office to remove the broken files. An Installation does
not replace files which already exist: you have to delete the bad ones
first.

So if Remove Office did not work, chances are that's because of bad disk
permissions, or because the user has moved Office or parts of it off the
boot partition after installation.

1. First, get into Word and look in Word>Preferences>File Locations to see
where the User Templates are. That¹s where the Normal Template is: if the
entry is blank, it¹s in the default location, don¹t worry about it we¹ll get
there in a minute. If it is not blank, make a note of the location. Also
check the location of the Startup folder. Again, if it¹s blank, ignore it,
otherwise note the location.
2. Quit (not just minimise) every Microsoft application on the computer.
3. If the Normal template or Startup folder had been moved, find them now
and ensure that you delete both.
4. Now get into ~/library/Preferences/.. And remove the Microsoft folder
completely (back it up, if everything goes pear-shaped you may need to put
it back).
5. Now track down the Microsoft Office X folder (which should be in
../Applications) and trash it.
6. Empty the trash, reboot, and run Disk Utility to repair permissions.
7. Re-install Office, preferably using the installer so we get everything in
the right place.
8. Repair Permissions again (this is important)
9. Now re-apply all the Office updaters, in the order in which they were
published.
10. Reboot.
11. Repair permissions again.
12. Start Word, wait a moment and quit it. This rebuilds the Normal
template and preferences.

If it¹s not fixed this time, it is bad font(s).
1. Remove all the fonts that were not supplied originally by either Apple or
Microsoft to a folder on the desktop. Visit all five font folders. Be very
suspicious of ³suitcase² fonts: they seem to cause more trouble than others.
You will not be able to change the content of the System font folder, so
ensure that you do not have copies of any of the fonts in there anywhere
else.
2. Now try. If the problem is fixed, replace half the fonts (alphabetically
by name or some other system so you know which ones...)
3. If the problem has come back, one or more of the fonts you just replaced
is bad. Remove half of them and repeat...
4. If the problem did not come back, put the other half back in. If the
problem comes back, see step 3.

This is an agonisingly laborious process, but eventually you will come down
to just one font which makes things go bad every time you put it back:
that¹s the bad one. This gets really difficult if you have more than one
bad font, so pray that you do not have.

Hope this helps

This responds to article <[email protected]>,

Thanks, but if you had completely read my original post, you would
have found that the first thing I tried was to repair permissions, as
you had indicated. This did not resolve the issue, not did it allow
me to remove Office using the "Remove Office" app on the original MS
Office CD.

Any other ideas?

--

Please respond only to the newsgroup to preserve the thread.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]