Word is broken! Help!
When the error occurs, try to find clues as to its nature:
- When you get the error message, does it offer to show you details of the error? If so, error details can be fed to Google, which will often produce articels on the exact problem.
- After the error message happens, does it come up with any message referring to the global template, Normal.dot?
Templates and Add-ins
It sounds like one of templates, macros or add-ins that Word loads on startup is to blame. Usually the things that go wrong in Word are either some other piece of software has installed an inefficient or broken plugin into Word, or something has corrupted Normal.dot, which sets up Word on startup.
Normal.dotIf you move Normal.dot to another location, Word won't be able to find it and will create a new one. Often that sorts out the problem. You can find Normal.dot by going to My Computer, right-clicking on the C: drive and choosing search. Then look for files named Normal.dot. When you search, make sure to that the option to look in hidden and system folders is switched on, or else Windows will not find it. The location will usually be something along the lines of: c:Documents and SettingsuserApplication DataMicrosoftTemplates
You can also find likely locations in Word looking in Tools>Options>File Locations - one would expect to find it in the User Templates location.{mospagebreak}
Plug-insIf the cause of the problem is a a plug in, than that's a little more complicated as the command for displaying plugins is not shown by default. Open Word (in safe mode!), then right click near a toolbar and choose customise. Choose "tools" on the left and "com add-ins" on the right. Then drag "Com Add-ins" to a toolbar and drop it in place. Then you can click on it and it'll show you if there's any add-ins installed. Probably there's a web page add in which is disabled - that seems to come as standard. If there's other things in there, try disabling them all and see if Word will start properly. This will - by process of elimination - find if one of them is the culprit.
One can also try choosing tools>templates and Add-ins and see what gets loaded at startup. You can turn off individual add-ins one by one to see if one of them breaks Word.
UpdatesIs Office fully up to date? It might be worthwhile downloading the latest Office 2003 service pack and installing it to update Office - that has been known to fix issues like this.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E25B7049-3E13-433B-B9D2-5E3C1132F206&displaylang=en
Adobe AcrobatAcrobat does pop up as a Word breaker on my searches on the net. It could be a good idea to uninstall Acrobat completely, reboot and then try Word: just to see if Acrobat is the culprit.
Open Source/Free AlternativesIf - for whatever reason - Acrobat will not install without breaking Word, here are two free alternatives for creating PDF documents.
- PrimoPDF is a free PDF creator you can get that works like Acrobat Distiller - i.e. you print to it like a printer. We've had no issues with it and Word.
- OpenOffice (also free) has a PDF writer built into it that's pretty good too, and it reads and writes (and fixes when they get corrupted) Word documents.
Further Reading
Unsurprisingly, Microsoft have produced quite a good guide on troubleshooting in Word in three parts.
