Microsoft Word 2002 crashing when opening specific documents

November 30, 2011 9:59 PM

Microsoft Word 2002, running on Windows XP, has started crashing when opening particular documents, but not others. Any troubleshooting advice?

The crash info:

AppName: winword.exe
AppVer: 10.0.2627.0
ModName: ntdll.dll
ModVer: 5.1.2600.6055
Offset: 00010a19

Curiously, there weren't any problems with the documents previously--this just started happening recently.

I suspect it has to do with an embedded image (a logo) in the document. The documents which don't crash have a lower-resolution version of the logo.

Things I've tried:
- Reboot
- Repair Microsoft Office
- Uninstall and reinstall printer driver
- Various registry keys and templates described on this Microsoft troubleshooting page

The computer is running AVG Free 2012, and a scan runs weekly; I've just launched another scan to make sure it isn't a virus.

Any other ideas? I'm installing LibreOffice, but I'd like to know what's wrong with Word.

Thanks in advance for any help!

posted by russilwvong to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Bad hard drive? Try moving the files to a different drive and opening them.
posted by Bonzai at 10:14 PM on November 30, 2011

Oftentimes problems like this come from a corrupted temporary file related to the doc in question. Do you see any of those weird "~yourfilename.tmp" type files in the folder? Maybe try deleting those?
posted by drjimmy11 at 10:18 PM on November 30, 2011

The MS DOC file format is tricky and a haven for viruses and corruptions.

Yes, the first thing to try is to get rid of temporary files. Download and use ccleaner (it's free) - be careful to have it clean only the things you don't want to keep.

Then reboot!!! And see what happens.

LibreOffice is pretty huge. A small and free alternative is softmakeroffice (free version 2008 or pay version 2010, try the free version). If you install these but you must use or still prefer to use MS Office, open the crashing document in LibreOffice or SoftMaker TextMaker, Save As RTF format, then import that RTF version back into MS Office. You can then save as DOC from MS Office and hopefully those documents will work well again for awhile.
posted by caclwmr4 at 11:32 PM on November 30, 2011

If you are trying to save (I mean keep here) the document, in Windows Explorer you can change the file extension from .doc to .txt and then open the file in Notepad. The formatting will be gone but the words will be there, so you can copy/paste the words from the corrupted Word file to a new one that uses the smaller logo and then reformat the document.
posted by Houstonian at 2:38 AM on December 1, 2011

Response by poster: A kind MeFite who works on the Microsoft Word team (and who will remain anonymous, to prevent a flood of requests to debug similar problems) did some debugging last night, and determined that it was indeed the embedded logo. The file was created using Word 2003, and Word 2002 isn't able to render the logo.

The solution is to upgrade to a later version of Office.

Thanks, anonymous! And thanks to everyone for their suggestions!
posted by russilwvong at 11:05 AM on December 1, 2011