Application Error – Hyperlink related? (2003/SP1)

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I need insight as to why one of my tech writers had a problematic document that was never detected as corrupt, but instead went directly to the “won’t open” phase:
1. After several successful hyperlink insertions (to URLs), the next attempt to insert a hyperlink resulted in a brief flash, then it “disappeared”.
2. Several test insertions of hyperlinks and cross-references had the same result. None of these test insertions displayed anything.
3. Saved the document, closed / re-opened Word (with no mention of any corruption found), all of the unsuccessful insertions suddenly re-incarnated themselves exactly where they had been entered.
4. Deleted what I thought might be a corrupt section break just before the place in the document where the hyperlink problems first appeared.
5. Attempts to insert hyperlinks in the same area were now successful. Continued inserting more hyperlinks with no problem.
6. Saved document. When trying to re-open, got message “Word has encountered a problem and needs to close.”
7. Got the msg: Instruction at “0x30170f4” referenced memory at “0x00000020”. The memory could not be read.
8. Got the msg: Unhandled exception in WINWORD.EXE 0xC0000005.: Access Violation.
9. In a code box labeled “Disassembly”, a yellow arrow pointed to 301730F4 cmp dword ptr [edi+20h], esi
I would appreciate any advice as to what happened, or how to best avoid this from happening again.
This is the second time this week my clients have had problems where Word does not display properly. The other occasion involved lack of display of spaces and tabs inside several figure captions.

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Display problems in Word documents are often related to either a lack of system resources or to problems with the video card / video drivers. Make sure that the tech writer’s PC has up-to-date drivers for the video card in his/her PC.

I fear that it’s virtually impossible to determine the real cause of the corruption. The error messages might give a programmer in the Word design team inside Microsoft some indication, but they are not useful to you or me.

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