After loading up Word today, I noticed it would become hung each time I went to the Insert tab. I was able to reproduce the behavior after killing the process and starting it up again. To troubleshoot, I started by going to the Windows 7 Task Manager, right-clicking, and selecting Create Dump File from the context menu:
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Posts Tagged ‘Word’
Getting the 32 Bit Stacks in a 64 Bit Dump
Posted by William Diaz on February 8, 2012
Posted in Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Dump, Hang, WinDbg, Word | 1 Comment »
Resolve That Application Crash The Easy Way
Posted by William Diaz on October 14, 2011
Sometimes Microsoft applications do a a good job at identifying the problem module when they crash. For example, in the Windows Vista/7 OS IE crashes with “Internet Explorer has stopped working”. Simply click the Details chevron to and look at the Fault Module Name:
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Crash, Hang, IE, Word | Leave a Comment »
The Case of the Failed Blog Post
Posted by William Diaz on May 4, 2011
Every now and then I use Word 2010 to blog. I recently ran into an issue where I could no longer post to my SharePoint blog at work from my workstation and the error was rather generic, not alluding to anything: “Word cannot publish this post. The provider where you are trying to publish is unavailable…”
This was odd because previously blogs posted normally. Additionally, I was able to post to my Word Press blog on the Internet and a different internal blog. To see what was happening, I turned to Process Monitor and set a filter for winword.exe. There was nothing unusual with the file and registry activity. However, network activity stood out:
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Blogging, Networking, Process Monitor, Word | Leave a Comment »
The Case of the Word Open Document Delays
Posted by William Diaz on February 4, 2011
After a certain amount of time troubleshooting Word issues (not document issues) in a large enterprise environment that uses several templates, macros, and other add-ins, one develops a troubleshooting drill. This normally involves isolating a problem to a startup template or add-in. We have a lot of them and they are always increasing. For Office Word 2003, you can find most of these in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\STARTUP:
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Posted in Office | Tagged: Hang, Word | Leave a Comment »
Zipity Do Da .Docx
Posted by William Diaz on December 28, 2010
It’s a mystery how some files get their file extensions changed or removed. I have no doubt that some users think that manually changing it makes it compatible with whatever program they want it to open in. We often get files that contain a .doc extension but fail to open in Word. Sometimes they are corrupted, sometimes they are in a newer version of Word, and sometimes they are not Word documents at all. When you run into these, the easiest way to determine what kind of file it is is to open it with Notepad (or any text reader for that matter) and look for readable text in the data. Here is an example:
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Posted in Office, Troubleshooting | Tagged: Word | Leave a Comment »
Process (Monitor) of Elimination
Posted by William Diaz on December 2, 2010
The problem presented itself as thus: “Microsoft Visual Basic … Run-time error ‘-2147024894 (800700002)’: Automation Error . The system cannot find the file specified.”
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Posted in Office, Troubleshooting | Tagged: Process Monitor, Word | 2 Comments »
Deleting the Word "Data" Key–What Does It Mean, Anyway?
Posted by William Diaz on November 19, 2010
The term corruption gets thrown around way too-often without actually knowing what it means or how it happens. If you troubleshoot Word often, all of us at one time or another have had to delete the Word Data key from the Windows Registry in an attempt to correct some problem. But what are you actually doing when you delete this key? To get an idea, visit the Word MVP site and read this: http://word.mvps.org/faqs/customization/DataKeySettings.htm
You should also familiarize yourself with the following Microsoft KB Article that covers the Word data key and a few other keys: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541
If you bother to look at the registry values you will see they are unreadable,but if you open the Settings REG_BINARY and scroll down you will see readable text, which contains, among other things, data to Word .dot files.
When we say that the Word data key is or may be "corrupt" this could mean that information here is referencing non-existent/moved data or problem add-ins, like templates. In fact, to demonstrate what a corrupted Word data key can do, I opened both REG_BINARY types and edited the data by typing gibberish into them. When done, I opened Word and produced the following:
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Crash, Word | Leave a Comment »
Blogging with Word
Posted by William Diaz on August 12, 2010
Did you know you can write and post to your blog from Word 2007 or 2010? Most popular blog sites are supported, including SharePoint, which is a big help for me since I blog a lot at work and IE SharePoint creation space is so cramp and limited.
For SharePoint blogging, write and post using Word by going into the SharePoint blog and from the Admin Links in the right side of the blog page select the Launch blog program to post: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Blogging, Word | 1 Comment »
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