Word 2000 hangs on start

[KVacek]

This has happened before on several systems with several OS's and several Office versions, but I never know what fixes it...

Word will not open existing documents, but will SOMETIMES open up with a blank document. Sometimes not. Even when it does open a blank document, it often hangs on closing Word. Sometimes it leaves WINWORD.exe running in the background - have to go to Task Manager to kill it.

When this happens, I usually remove and then reinstall Office, and all of the service packs, etc. I have never had any success with "Repair". Total R&R never seems to help this problem, but I still try it. I have R&R'd Office and all the SP's, etc. this morning, and that didn't fix it this time either.

I usually then R&R the OS (in this case it's Win2000Pro, but this has happened with the various 98's and XP too, even with Office XP on Win XP and on other systems, not just the current Dell laptop). The OS doesn't usually repair it either. I haven't done that yet, but that's my next step unless somebody has a better solution...

Somehow, after tearing out my hair all day, sometimes into the second day, it begins to work. But I never know why or how to reproduce the repair next time.

It's happening today, and I really don't have time for all the fun of R&R'ing software right now.

I do seem to recall a solution someone once offered for a similar problem involving access to or corruption of a "PFiles" directory somewhere. Of course I can't find the reference at the moment. Could that be a solution to this problem???

I know this sounds flaky. It's NOT corrupted documents - it happens with them all, and once it's fixed (remember, this has happened to me every 6 months or so for years), every document is just fine.

I need a vacation...

TIA

Karl Vacek

 

[Brent113]

don't you just love microsoft?

It sometimes happens to me, too. If you open Word and then click open/[filename] does it still do it? Because if not you could have a corrupted registry entry. I'm not sure if a reinstall will take care of a bad registry entry, so it's possible. This is probably not it, but it's an idea.

 

[KVacek]

In THIS instance of the problem I can open Word with a blank document OK. I can then open lots more blank documents. When I have Wrod running I can SOMETIMES do a File/Open on SMALL existing documents (a few K), but nothing large.

One thing I did do was to install this morning's Windows Updates from MS (automatically downloaded, manually installed).

I've been looking all over the Internet and places like Langa List and Woody's, but nobody has mentioned any problems with these, and since this is a familiar problem, I tend to think that's unrelated. To make sure, however, I uninstalled those updates - no help.

Karl

 

[KVacek]

PROBLEM SOLVED !!

I got the following message off another forum:

Phil Rabichow has an excellent Systematic Approach to Behavioral Problems in Word (97/2000)

http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/showthreaded.pl?Number=197827

Although I had replaced Normal.dot twice already today, it was still corrupted. Put in a default version and it ran fine. Got my old back-up version of Normal.dot back in operation next, with no problem. All my macros, etc. are working like nothing ever happened.

Thanks for the suggestions !!

Karl