Persistent Word 2000 crash/freezes

Windows 98SE, 750 mHz, 128M RAM, plenty of disk space

Word 2000 (not Office; this is the edition of Word that came with Works Suite 2000)

I've been having repeated crash/freezes in Word lately, the kind where, when I run Word and try to open a file, the hourglass appears and nothing happens. If I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I get an error message that I'm "dangerously low on resources" (but I'm not; Windows' Resource Meter is nice and green).

At that point things are frozen, and I have to turn off the computer.

Whatever is going on, after rebooting, deleting Normal.dot and replacing it with a copy of a backup (a backup I created before this started happening) clears the problem up, at least for one Word session, sometimes two or three. (Rebooting by itself doesn't solve the problem.)

My very limited take is that something is corrupting Normal.dot when I exit Word (although not every time; and sometimes the freeze will happen in the middle of a session when I've been working on a file and then try to open another one, although usually opening another file midsession will go perfectly smoothly).

Many of the files I've been working on since this has been happening have a particular template I created attached in addition to Normal.dot; I can't remember whether the problem started happening immediately after I created this template, but I don't think so. I think I may have been using it for at least a few days before Word started crashing. The template is pretty ordinary.

Before this started happening on a regular basis, the same thing would occur from time to time, but at relatively long intervals.

I'm sure I should reinstall Word (for that matter I should reinstall Windows too; it's been running for several years now and is probably a mess), but I do not have the time and won't for some weeks.

It seems I can work around the problem by replacing Normal.dot every time before I run Word, but that's a pain in the neck (and it won't eliminate the midsession crashes).

From what I've detailed above, does anybody have any bright ideas for tracking down the problem and fixing it?

Many thanks.

 

have you scanned for viruses lately?

 

Yes, can't now remember whether it was immediately before or immediately after the crashes began, but right around the same time, as part of my regular routine. My virus protection is up to date as well. I suppose I'd better do it again, just to make sure, but I'm dubious that could be the problem. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

Yah, I got all this stuff you list.

I haven't installed anything new that runs in the background since long before this problem started. In any case, the really persistent crash/freeze pattern occurs when I run Word and try to open a document. Midsession crashes are much less frequent, but any of the crashes of the freeze type happen only when I open a document. I will occasionally get crashes of the "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" variety, but I always *did* have those. I'm not sure they're even related.

 

In order:

I'm up to date with Windows 98SE fixes, but I don't run Office; I'm running the Word 2000 that came with Works Suite 2000.

As I noted, I don't have the time to do a reinstall of even just Word right now.

I've just done a virus scan. Is there other malware that might affect Word this way?

I don't know what processes are running when this happens because it's a freeze and I have to turn off the computer and reboot. But whatever they are, they haven't changed since long before this started happening. I haven't installed anything new or reconfigured my system for quite a while.

Ran Scandisk and defragged about three weeks ago.

I'd *love* to go to that URL, but unfortunately it got broken in the middle, and three characters have been lost. I assume the first two are d/. Any idea what the third might be?

 

Never mind, I found it another way. Takes almost *three hours* to install over the Web, so that's out. Incredible. And that's with *very fast* cable modem. What must it take folks on dialup?

That has to be a complete reinstall of Word, if not all kinds of other things along with it, even though they call it a "service pack." *Three hours*!

 

Well, another never mind. The estimate of installation time must have been based on a 56K modem; it only took about an hour to download and complete the installation.

Unfortunately, it didn't help in the slightest; exactly the same behavior as before.

 

Sorry, no can do. As I said, I don't have time to reinstall. I'm working on a tight deadline. If nobody has any other bright ideas, I'm just going to have to try to keep Word open as long as possible and replace Normal.dot with the backup after each time I have to exit.

Somebody on another list suggested making Normal.dot read-only. He said some folks say *that* will make Word crash, but that many other people said it never had for them.

I think I'm going to try that. Assuming that by itself doesn't make Word crash, if it doesn't help with the current problem, it will mean the backup I've been using is also corrupted, but not enough to keep Word from running, until after it's shut down and restarted. If it does help, it'll mean something has been happening to Normal.dot to corrupt it while Word is running or when it's shutting down. (At least that's my analysis--corrections welcome.)

 

Obviously a re-install looks your best bet, but are you 100% certain your back-up Normal.dot is not corrupt
I would keep your back-up somewhere safe but when you delete the newest one dont bother replacing it with your back-up, just start Word up again and it should create a totally new one
If this doesnt help at all you still have your back-up to keep you going until such time you can manage a re-installation

Just a thought

 

Update: I tried this, and it appears to have fixed the problem. For the first time in about a week, I've been able to run Word, access a document, make a change, save the document, close Word, reopen it, and access another document without Word freezing on me.

Word now gives me a message when I close it that it can't make changes to the global template (presumably Normal.dot--it's the only global template I have) because it's read-only. In this test, I made only a very minor change to one document, saved it, and immediately closed Word, so I'm WILDLY curious as to what the change is that Word wanted to make to Normal.dot. Whatever it is, I'm very suspicious that it's what has been causing the problem.

What kind of change could it be? Any ideas?

Also, as I said, it would appear from this test that my backup of Normal.dot is not corrupted.

It remains to be seen whether making Normal.dot read-only will precipitate other kinds of crashes...

 

One other interesting thing: Word now opens *much* faster than it did before. Does this tell me anything?

 

I haven't looked at the prior posts, but do this as another method. Since improvements has been made by making normal.dot read only, either delete or rename the normal.dot file, Word will automatically create a new normal.dot file.

 

I'd have done that long since if it weren't for the fact that I've done a lot of customization; that would be lost if I let Word create a new normal.dot.

I'm pretty sure the backup is not corrupt, however, since I used it to create a read-only normal.dot, and as I announced a little while ago, the crash problem appears to be gone. Something seems to have been corrupting normal.dot either while Word was running or while it was closing, since it would work fine if it opened it using a fresh backup copy as normal.dot.

 

Don't want to create a new one because I'll lose my customization. You really do need to read the prior posts to see what the problem was. As long as I've got a normal.dot that doesn't make Word crash every time I run it and try to open a document--which making normal.dot read-only now appears to be preventing--I'm happy. The new speed in opening is a nice bonus, but the reason I mentioned it was that I thought it might give some sort of clue as to what had been causing the original crashes.

*Something* must have been going on when Word was loading the old read/write version of normal.dot that made it take longer, something that *isn't* going on now that I've made it read-only. (It's exactly the same file, just made read-only.)

 

Judith Stein's post, 03-10-04

I came across Judith's post yesterday and was intrigued by her 14-page account in quest of the Holy Grail, as I shared with her experience in persistent Word 2000 crashes and freezes. It was all very well to go the whole hog as her post suggrested, but the fact of the matter was that the only perfect solution to the problem was, as she somehow found out in part, to replace the corrupted normal.dot with a good copy from another perfectly working computer of the same specifications. I used Windows Me to come to my rescue by copying its normal.dot to my Windows 98SE, taking care of their respective correct paths. Thus, in the Windows 98SE case, it is c:\windows\application data\microsoft\templates, whereas they are c:\windows\app... and c:\windows\profi... in Windows Me. It works like a dream despite the discrepancy in file sizes (305KB in Windows 98SE versus 178KB in Windows Me).
Tosogwan

 

Persistent Word crash/freezes

Well, er, um, replacing normal.dot with a good copy was only the very shortest-term of solutions, since it was apparently getting corrupted each time I exited Word--so I'd have to replace it *each time* before I ran Word again.

The long-term (but still not perfect) solution was to make a known-good copy of normal.dot (from a backup) read-only so it couldn't get corrupted. It's not a perfect solution because Word still thinks it needs to change normal.dot when it exits, even if I have only opened it and then immediately closed it without doing anything in between. It's just that now it *can't* make whatever change it wants to make because normal.dot is read-only.

Whatever was causing the crash/freezes is still there, but it's been rendered impotent to do whatever it was doing to cause the crashes.

Also, I didn't replace normal.dot with "a good copy from another perfectly working computer," I replaced it with a backup copy that I'd made on the *same* computer back when things were working normally.

But it's a good suggestion to bear in mind, either that or making a backup copy of normal.dot when everything is going smoothly.

 

Persistent Word crash/freezes

Update--Someone on another forum suggested what seems to have been the solution: uninstall the Works Add-in. Apparently it's what was causing Word to write to Normal.dot every time it exits, and somewhere along the line that process itself must have gotten corrupted so that the change was creating a corrupt Normal.dot that caused a crash/freeze the next time I ran Word and tried to open a document. Making Normal.dot read-only had prevented the crash/freezes, but Word was still trying to write to Normal.dot when it exited.

At any rate, I uninstalled the Works Add-in, and now Word doesn't try to change Normal.dot when it exits. I then made Normal.dot read/write again, and everything *seems* to be fine, although I haven't yet done any heavy-duty work in Word since making those changes.