Problem opening document (XP sp2)

Topic

New Reply

Hi all,

We have a number of documents that are sent to us from another agency. Today the users of these documents were upgraded to XP and where they could previously open the documents with no issues the document load now provides the message
“An error occued while loading ThisDocument. Do you want to continue loading the project?”

Saying Yes causes an error reporting dialog with the details
AppName: winword.exe AppVer: 10.0.6612.0 ModName: unknown
ModVer: 0.0.0.0 Offset: 00000030

Saying No opens the document but there is no ability to save the document after this occurs.

Opening the document in office 97 presents none of these problems. The interestin thing is that there is no VBA for the documents when opened in 97.

Has anyone seen anything like this before and / or suggest where I may find more information.

sample doc attached

Thanks

Stewart

Reply | Quote

Replies

Apparently the macro container of the documents has become corrupted; Word 2000 and up have more checks for that kind of thing than Word 97. Perhaps the template used by the other agency to create the documents has become corrupt; that would explain why all documents from this agency have this problem. You should inform them of this.

If I have the Visual Basic Editor open when I open the document in Word, I get the same error you mention.
If I don’t have the Visual Basic Editor open when I open the document in Word, I get the ‘… contains macros’ warning, but not the ‘An error occurred while loading ThisDocument’ message. (It does appear if I then try to activate the Visual Basic Editor). I can copy the contents of the document to a new document.

Reply | Quote

Hans,

The source agency are using Office 2k and we are currently negotiating with them to replace their template with a new clean one.

It is interesting that you had different results with the macro security settings. I tried high medium and low and all 3 crashed the document to a greater or lesser degree. The best result was getting the document open and being able to print it.

Thanks for the help.

Stewart

Reply | Quote

Hans,

The source agency are using Office 2k and we are currently negotiating with them to replace their template with a new clean one.

It is interesting that you had different results with the macro security settings. I tried high medium and low and all 3 crashed the document to a greater or lesser degree. The best result was getting the document open and being able to print it.

Thanks for the help.

Stewart

Reply | Quote

Apparently the macro container of the documents has become corrupted; Word 2000 and up have more checks for that kind of thing than Word 97. Perhaps the template used by the other agency to create the documents has become corrupt; that would explain why all documents from this agency have this problem. You should inform them of this.

If I have the Visual Basic Editor open when I open the document in Word, I get the same error you mention.
If I don’t have the Visual Basic Editor open when I open the document in Word, I get the ‘… contains macros’ warning, but not the ‘An error occurred while loading ThisDocument’ message. (It does appear if I then try to activate the Visual Basic Editor). I can copy the contents of the document to a new document.

Reply | Quote

Congratulations, Stewart, yours is the first document I’ve ever seen crash OpenOffice. Yikes.

The macros are probably gone for good, but you can recover the contents using the method Hans described.

Good luck!

Reply | Quote

Andrew,

It’s not my document I’m just trying to get the user going again . As to crashing Open Office, well there is always a first time I guess but I’m sure that I could live without the honor.

To be honest I don’t care about the Macros, the user can print the documents and do whatever else she then needs to do with the information but as she receives numerous documents every day I was looking to reduce the pain factor for her.

We are negotiating with the source agency to recreate their template(s) and solve our problem.

Thanks for your help.

Stewart

Reply | Quote

Andrew,

It’s not my document I’m just trying to get the user going again . As to crashing Open Office, well there is always a first time I guess but I’m sure that I could live without the honor.

To be honest I don’t care about the Macros, the user can print the documents and do whatever else she then needs to do with the information but as she receives numerous documents every day I was looking to reduce the pain factor for her.

We are negotiating with the source agency to recreate their template(s) and solve our problem.

Thanks for your help.

Stewart

Reply | Quote

As Hans notes, it seems best to Disable macros (security must be set to Medium to get the dialog) and then perhaps Save As RTF to purge the macro data.

I wonder whether the document became corrupted as a result of an antivirus program “cleaning” it? I think that used to happen in the past, so if it really is an old document (or based on an old document), that is a possibility.

Incidentally, when I opened the document using the “Recover Text from Any File (*.*)” filter, I was surprised by the amount of strange content (looks like registry keys, GUIDs, and so forth). Perhaps it was a template renamed to a DOC file in a former life? Although, with instructions to change the registry, it is looking more and more “viral.”

Reply | Quote

Jefferson,

Thanks for the tip on the “Recover Text from Any File (*.*)” filter. It did make for interesting viewing. I’m not sure of the history of the template that the document is created from but we are in the process of trying to resolve this.

Thnaks for taking the time to look at my problem.

Stewart

Reply | Quote

Jefferson,

Thanks for the tip on the “Recover Text from Any File (*.*)” filter. It did make for interesting viewing. I’m not sure of the history of the template that the document is created from but we are in the process of trying to resolve this.

Thnaks for taking the time to look at my problem.

Stewart

Reply | Quote

As Hans notes, it seems best to Disable macros (security must be set to Medium to get the dialog) and then perhaps Save As RTF to purge the macro data.

I wonder whether the document became corrupted as a result of an antivirus program “cleaning” it? I think that used to happen in the past, so if it really is an old document (or based on an old document), that is a possibility.

Incidentally, when I opened the document using the “Recover Text from Any File (*.*)” filter, I was surprised by the amount of strange content (looks like registry keys, GUIDs, and so forth). Perhaps it was a template renamed to a DOC file in a former life? Although, with instructions to change the registry, it is looking more and more “viral.”

Reply | Quote