Platform: Office 2K SR1a on Win2K SP1 on Dell Latitude
Ever since I rebuilt my laptop with Win2K over Christmas I have been suffering strange occasional crashes of Word, Outlook and Excel (possibly others but these are the three I use regularly).
A few seconds after commencing work (as opposed to merely loading) with one of the programs it would produce a program error. For example “WINWORD.EXE has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You need to restart the program. An error log is being created”. WORD and EXCEL would die fairly quickly but, if I got it with OUTLOOK, it would hang in this state for a long time.
Finally I’ve found out what the problem is and I want to share it with the community. As I said I get this on my laptop, which I usually take home over the weekend where I have configured it to use my home network printer as default. On Monday morning, half-asleep, I start WORD or EXCEL or OUTLOOK without remembering to reconfigure the default printer and bang, my office world crashes about my ears. The work I’m doing with the Office program doesn’t have to have anything to do with printers or printing. Once I set the default printer to be one that is available in the office, the problem goes away.
I don’t know if this is an Off2K or a Win2K problem but I do know it has only manifested itself with the Office 2K programs, so far. It strikes me that this is an overreaction to the default printer not being available. Both printers are network printers, the one at home being served by a Win98 desktop, the one in the office being server by a Win2K desktop.
I hope this helps anyone else who is suffering this annoyance.
