Fix for Word 97 crashes

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Question: My Microsoft Word 97 program keeps crashing randomly. Sometimes the system just freezes and I have to reboot. It’s been this way for three weeks and I can barely get through a document before it freezes and I lose the most recent changes. It’s driving me nuts. –A.W.

Answer: I once dated a very lovely woman whose father was an electrician. He was the electrical expert in the town where he lived and old ladies would invite him over to do all manner of electrical jobs around the house, including change lightbulbs. His own house, however, was frequently in a state of disrepair. I can relate to him this week, because while I’ve been doling out advice, my own computer at home has been rather broken. You see, the letter above is from me to me…but I’ve been ignoring it because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was wrong. Anyway, I had some time this week and decided to give it a go.

I recently installed a new Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! card with surround sound audio, which is plugged into a Cambridge Soundworks Desktop Theatre 5.1 speaker system. (It’s fabulous, by the way.) I thought this might be the problem.

Whenever I troubleshoot anything, I always check to make sure that anything new that I’ve added isn’t what’s causing the problem. I removed the theater system and worked with Word, but the problem came back. So I knew that the new hardware wasn’t the problem. To solve this one, I went to the Office Update website’s troubleshooter wizards. These are a series of walk-through problem solvers on the Microsoft site.

This is what I found:

During startup, Word loads the registry Data key, the Normal.dot global template, and any templates or add-ins located in the OfficeStartup folder. If any of these items are damaged, Word may cause an Invalid Page Fault. You can temporarily bypass these items by starting Word with the /a switch — here’s how to do that:

  1. Go to Start > Run.
  2. Click the Browse button.
  3. Locate the directory where the file Winword.exe is located. The default location is C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice so look there first.
  4. Click Winword.exe and then click Open.
  5. Click in the Open box and press the End key on the keyboard to put your cursor after the closing quotation marks surrounding the file name.
  6. Type a space followed by /a so that the command line looks like this: C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOfficeWinword.exe /a
  7. Click OK.

If Word starts correctly, the problem is with a damaged registry Data key, a Normal.dot global template, or a template or add-in. So how do you fix it? Close down Word. Locate the file Normal.dot. Rename it to something else … maybe Normal.xxx. Now see if the problem still persists. If it does, the problem may lie with a Word add-in program or template.

To solve this:

  1. Locate the Office Startup folder. The default location for this is C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOfficeStartup so look there first.
  2. Drag the contents of this folder to another location, such as your desktop.
  3. Start Word normally and try to reproduce the problem.

If you’re still having problems, you’ll have to do a little registry editing. It’s complex, so without reproducing it here, I’d advise you to use the Word 97 for Windows troubleshooter and follow the instructions there. Getting to the Troubleshooter Wizards on the Microsoft Web site is somewhat arduous because their Web pages are database driven, so here’s a walk through.

  1. Go to officeupdate.microsoft.com
  2. Click Office Update Support and then Office Update Popular Topics.
  3. On the left of the screen click Troubleshooters and, on the next page, choose the software you’re having problems with from the pull-down menu. Then click Go.

Finally, if all this seems like nonsense, and you don’t need the nitty-gritty bother, I’d recommend that you remove Microsoft Office completely from your machine, and reinstall it.