Word hangs whole system.....

[Ganj]

Hi Im trying to resolve this problem at work,someone brought in this rig (Win 98 OS) 3 hours ago saying simply that word freezes in its load screen (full blown system hang with white winword.exe does not respond message) everything else works fine.
I tested it to verify the problem and this is exactly the case.
I have tryed reinstalling Office 2000 as a whole and still same problem,I also tryed cleaning registry for every winword instance I could find and then installing again and still nothing.Me and my boss are both like wtf,we never seen this before,and of course we dont want to have to format.Any ideas?
I thought for a chance maybe its hardware related but my boss said nah,what do you guys think?

 

[Ganj]

I dont know if its an illegal copy or not.But anyways how would this be the problem?Office doesnt use any kind of serial key protection or crack to run.

 

[Ganj]

Office 2000 doesnt requiere a product key,I already mentioned that 😉

 

[Codesmith]

Once I had a similar problem, turned out I needed to reinstall norton AV. Word would start to load, request a virus scan from NAV which would time out.

Probably not what is happening on your system, just thought I'd throw it out there just in case.

Personally I would ask the user if he would mind trying OpenOffice as a replacement

It meets all my office needs (except the right click menu's kept appearing only my first monitor).

 

[Zoron]

You can install any version of Office without a product key period. Run Setup /s on another machine, and that does a server install that will allow you to install on different workstations without ever having to enter the product key. You can also burn a copy of this server install to take with you... no need for a product key or activation with this method.

As to Word freezing... it wouldn't happen to be a Packard-Bell / NEC computer you're working on, would it?

<font color=red> If you design software that is fool-proof, only a fool will want to use it. </font color=red>

 

[Zoron]

If you have a retail or OEM licensed version of Office 2003, XP, 2000, or 97 what happens the first time you run an Office application such as Word?

I don't know about you, but it opens up and I start using it... at least it has with every version of Office I've used to date.



<font color=red> If you design software that is fool-proof, only a fool will want to use it. </font color=red>

 

[Ganj]

Office itself is not the problem.Like I said this is just a problem with Word.All other Office apps start up fine,as well as any other executable on this HD.Only Word and just Word is giving us this problem.

 

[Zoron]

Ok... could you post the system specs? The reason I asked if it was a Packard Bell / NEC system is because they had this useless piece of crap program called CyberEye or something along those lines. We had one comp that gave us nothing but problems... one of them was MS Word being screwed up... then NEC tech support let us in on the secret. The first thing they do when troubleshooting is disable this 'CyberEye' crapware. Apparently it royally screws with some files.

<font color=red> If you design software that is fool-proof, only a fool will want to use it. </font color=red>

 

[Ganj]

Hardwarewise its an ECS P6BAP-A+ Rev 2.2 P3 Coppermine (i think 866 mhz)
128 megs PC133
TnT 2 32 meg vid card
56k internal modem

Pretty much a typical older rig constructed for general home use.I hope a solution shows up soon cause my boss is getting ready to do a full system format on the original HD.
Word USED to work and now its giving this problem if thats of any relevance.

 

[Codesmith]

If you have files you want to keep you don't have to reformat.

With windows 9x you boot to dos and rename or delete the windows and program file folders. Then copy all the files in the root director to a folder or just delete them.

Don't forget to save your Desktop Folder if you are going to delete "Windows"

I used to keep a backup copy of these two folders and the root level files so I could switch back to a clean install whenever I had problems.