Word keeps locking up (Not Responding)

[Gary]

Some of the time when opening Word or while working in Word, the program
locks up and at the top of the page I get the message (Not Responding). I
have run the diagnostics program several times but it doesn't find any thing
wrong.
How do I fix this?

Thanks

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

If not, the usual suspects are:

1. Corrupted Normal.dotm or Normal.dot file (which depends on your version
of Word). Try renaming or deleting this file.

2. Corrupted Data key in the registry. Try deleting the Data key. Word will
create a new one automatically. In Word 2007, it's here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data

3. Misbehaving add-in. Start Word as administrator, and disable all add-ins.
Close Word, then restart Word, and see if it now closes normally. If it
does, then re-enable add-ins one at a time to see if the problem is
associated

Note: more specific help would depend on which version of Word you're using.

 

[Twayne]

In

Some of the time when opening Word or while working in
Word, the program locks up and at the top of the page I get
the message (Not Responding). I have run the diagnostics
program several times but it doesn't find any thing wrong.
How do I fix this?

Thanks

How long do you wait before bailing out when you see the "not resonding"
message? What that message really means is that the processor is too busy to
do what you've asked it to do, and the "not responding" might go away if you
give it the time to finish whatever it's doing.
Try waiting for, say, two full minutes before you bail out; to see if the
cpu can get around to servicing the latest request.
OTOH the probram might really be in outer space or in a loop somewhere;
"Not Responding" messages don't make that distinction. As long as you're
using a fairly good machine, two minutes is long enough to see if the cpu
can get back to you. I once had it go to four minutes but that was the
exception to the rule. If System Idle % is like 2 or 3 %, there's nothing
happening and you can close it out. If the cpu time is in the high 90%s,
you'll have trouble getting TaskManage to open, so once again, close out.
It's something to do while waiting for the two minutes to pass and gives
some hint about the system's performance at that moment. If System Idle is
0%, it's also locked up, so go ahead and bail out after two minutes.

There are more technical tests that can be made, but most often intermittant
problems like yours are a matter of not waiting long enough for the cpu to
get back to service the not responding window. If/when it comes back, the
not responding will go away.

HTH,

Twayne`