Word won’t start (2000)

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Hope you can advise on this one. A customer of mine (I did some Access programming for them) has had ‘problems with Word for a long time’ (unquote) on one PC and they asked me to help when Word finally failed to start at all. The splash screen appeared but then it hung. Ctrl-Alt-Del did nothing, and eventually a Win 3.1-style dialog appeared saying that WInword had caused the system to get low on resources, or some such. Then Windows98 hung totally.

I tried Office Repair – no change. Uninstalled Word, and reinstalled. No Change. Noticed that the Add/Remove Apps control panel listed Office Pro 2000, Office Premium 2000 SR1 AND Word 2000 (from Works Suite). Uninstalled all of them. Reinstalled Office Pro 2000. Everything else is fine, but Word still hangs: now we get the splash screen, but with added window fragments (like _-x buttons bottom-left of the screen) and an empty “Explorer” dialog.

Ideas please? TIA

James

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You’ve examined the virus angle, right?
Search all attached drives for normal.dot. Delete them all.
Verify that NO add-ins load at startup.

If you reinstall again, be sure to remove all the Office registry keys before
installing.

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Thanks for the pointers. There had been a virus problem – whether that had corrupted normal.dot I don’t know, but this afternoon I renamed it and lo! Word was back to life.

Cheers

James

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James,

I had the same problem with Word 2000 and did much of what you have described, to no avail. You probably have a corrupted Normal.dot file. My solution was to search for Normal.dot and delete it! Look for Normal.dot in your Templates folder. First, rename Normal.dot file to ‘bad’ or whatever suits you. Second, start Word 2000. Third close Word 2000. Fourth, restart Word 2000. It should now start without hanging up. After that I delete the renamed ‘bad’ Normal.dot. Please note that you will lose any specific styles you have set up in Normal.dot which you can set up again. Oh, and periodically make a backup of Normal.dot. Good luck and hang in there.

LMD

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Oddly enough, I had exactly the same problem this morning too, and so did my assistant. No virus, according to Mr. Norton, but who knows?

Anyway, I erased all copies of Normal.dot all over the network, and then Word would indeed start up.

However, all my menus are gone! I just get a full-screen document and no File, Edit, etc. menu names across the top. The only toolbar present is “Add new Buttons.”

I can go to Tools|Customize (or at least MS Help can do it for me), then on the Toolbars tab there are “existing toolbars” that I can drag up to the menu bar and it looks good for a while, but when I close the Customize dialog, all my newly added toolbars disappear. Right-clicking on the one toolbar that’s present also takes me to a “customize” dialog box, but it doesn’t list anything to put back on except Add New Buttons and Clipboard.

I even took a copy of Normal.dot from another computer (not on the same network) and copied it in, with the same results.

This, after uninstalling Office 2000 entirely (but not the registry keys) and reinstalling completely.

What could I try next?

rich

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You could very well have corrupt registry keys besides a corrupt Normal.dot.

You need to look at this:

Deleting and recreating the corrupt registry values

Whenever you delete these reg keys, delete the normal.dot too.
In others words, if you fix only the reg keys, a corrupt normal.dot
will re-corrupt the registry (and vise versa).

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Unbelievable! Thanks so much!

The first trick in your reference article was just to try

Start|run winword.exe /a

and see if that rebuilds things, and in fact it did just that. The /a switch forces Word to rebuild corrupt indices, if they’re corrupt enough, and that’s what I needed.

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That’s exactly what it was – damaged normal.dot. I returned today and had it fixed in a couple of minutes. Thanks for your help and support!

James

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