"There was a problem sending the command to the program"-Word 07

[mbrayc]

Hello all,

I have a user who was set up with a new windows 7 computer (actually an ex-Vista machine bought from a refurbisher) with Office 2007 Professional Plus installed. Whenever the user tries to open a Word document, Word hangs at the splash screen for 5-10 minutes, then shows an error window stating "There was a problem sending the command to the program." This would happen no matter how Word was opened, be it their Word shortcut on their desktop, a shortcut to a Word document, opening the file in its original location (Computer or Windows Explorer), or attempting to open Word itself. It happens with all Word documents. I tried Detect and Repair, as well as uninstalling and reinstalling Office, but had no success. I found several solutions on Microsoft forums and a detailed knowledge base article (KB921541) and worked through the steps. When I removed the Word registry entries, Word started working again. This morning, the user had gone to change their monitor settings to the 125% size option under Display in the Control Panel and rebooted when prompted. While attempting to open Outlook on their taskbar, they accidentally clicked on a Word document shortcut instead. Lo and behold, the original symptoms appeared. None of the previous troubleshooting steps worked this time, including going through the rest of that knowledge base article (including renaming the Normal template), but still no luck. The computer came with OpenOffice installed, and the Word documents can be opened with OpenOffice writer. All other MS Office programs work normally, only Word is affected.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance,

Michael

 

[mbrayc]

Additional information: Tried re-running Office Diagnostics, but seems to be hung on part 1 of 15 on the setup file checks.

 

[genomon]

I had this happen when there was no active printer selected as default.

Beir bua agus beannacht!

 

[mbrayc]

Possibly. The user doesn't have a printer of their own, but they are connected to several shared printers, one of which is listed as their default. I just visited them because their computer would lock up when attempting to print anything. When trying to access the Devices and Printers screen, the computer would hang again. However, rebooting the computer resolved that problem.

Thanks again for your help.

 

[mbrayc]

Sorry for the late reply. Rechecked my work and tied the problem to an incompatible printer driver (printer was connected to an XP computer). Found solution online to connect to shared printer (created local port, set path using UNC, and downloaded windows 7 driver for printer). Word now works normally. Thanks for everyone for their posts.