Error on starting word - removing and re-installing doesn't fix 1

[electricpete]

System: Windows XP SP3 on Toshiba Satellite Laptop with MS Office Professional 2000 Suite installed.

Symptoms: Whenever I try to start MS Word, I get the message "MS Word For Windows has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost. Please tell Microsoft about this problem... choices "Send Error Report or Don't send".

What happens when I choose "send error report": MS tells me that my program crashed and they don't know why - this version is no longer supported but they will be happy to sell me a newer version.

* When did the problem start: It all started immediately after the following scenario: I was copying a large number of files/directories from flash to hard drive, had them all highlighted, copy was in progress. I accidentally hit the keyboard (apparently the return key) and it started opening every single file that was highlighted (there were hundreds and hundreds). Opened many word files, many excel files, many pds files, etc probably 10 different applications. My reaction was to close all those windows and as I closed them more kept popping up. I got a few "error messages" (like the one above) but figured the system was just overwhelmed and kept closing windows. Then tried to open a word file and saw this error for the first time.

When does it occur: Whenever lauch word either by clicking on a document or selecting MS Word from the menu.

What else is wrong with my ssystem: Nothing else that I can see. All other MS Office applications work fine. My McAfee Virus scan doesn't detect anything wrong with my system.

What have I done To Try To Solve it: I removed Office completely. Deleted my templates, and reinstalled Office. IT STILL DOES THE SAME THING!

Any help/suggestions you can offer would be appreicated. I have no way of accessing MS Word on this PC.

 

[macropod]

Hi electripete,

First off, uninstalling & reinstalling isn't likely to achieve anything that running Help|Detect & Repair won't do.

Beyond that, try the approaches suggested here:

http://www.wopr.com/index.php?showtopic=197827&st=0&p=197827&#entry197827

and

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/ProblemsStartingWord.htm

for various series of troubleshooting steps that will help you track down (and hopefully solve) the problem.


[MS MVP - Word]

 

[electricpete]

Thanks, that fixed it.

I had tried repair before I tried removing/reinstalling. Had also tried deleting normal.dot.

It turns out there were 5 different copies of normal.dot floating around my harddrive. Word must have been finding one that was bad. When I renamed them all the problem went away.