Word 2007 mystery crash resolved
Last week, I was baffled when Word 2007 began crashing each time I closed the program. This was happening on a secondary system running Windows Vista Business, so I made a mental note to look into it more closely when I had a chance.
Today, I ran across a new Knowledge Base article, 940791, which described a set of symptoms that were a perfect match for mine:
You install an automatic update for Microsoft Office Word 2007 on a Windows Vista-based computer. Additionally, the computer must be restarted after the automatic update is installed. However, if Word 2007 is running when you restart the computer, you may experience the following symptoms:
- The mouse does not work when you use Word 2007.
- You cannot open a Word document from the Search window in Windows Vista.
- You cannot open a Word document from Windows Desktop Search.
- Word crashes when you try to start or to exit Word.
The article doesn’t say which update is to blame, but my money is on either 939159 or 933360, both of which were released on August 29 and rated Important. A quick look at the Windows Update history pane shows that those two updates were applied to my system on August 29, and Event Viewer’s Microsoft Office Sessions log confirms that was the date the Word crashes began. Word 2007 had indeed been running last week when those updates were applied. I remember because I noted that the unsaved document I had been working on had been automatically saved and was automatically reopened after the system restarted.
The fix is fairly simple, As explained in the original article, just delete the following Registry subkey:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
Mystery solved.
70 Responses to Word 2007 mystery crash resolved
This is great – it worked exactly as stated. Now I just hope that Microsoft decides not to F*&^% it up again.
Thank you for the posting – it’s good intelligence
That the solution worked for me too! My hat is off to you! Thank you! I’ve spent way to many hours trying to figure this out! Cheers!
WOW U ROCK that totally fixed my issue of having the crash after hitting the X button as well. I made the mistake of installing SP1 for office and let windows update corrupt my word 07
Deleting the data key did not work for me. However, my search led me to another thread that went further to suggest disabling the COM Add-ins one by one to see if one of them was the culprit.
It wound up being the “Send to Bluetooth” Add-in. I no longer have to pull out my hair when trying to exit Word 2007.
Thanks very much. Encountered the same problem and the fix worked perfectly.
Thanx a bunch!
I tried just about everything to fix this annoying bug and was at wits end until i ran across this article…
It worked like a charm….thanx again!
Wow. Thank you so much. I was in the process of uninstalling Office 2007 altogether when I finally found your post. Luckily i was able to rollback the uninstall-in-progress. Knowing windows, the uninstall wouldn’t have cleared the reg key anyway, so again. thanks a lot.
Yep, that solved one of the Windows annoyances. I’ll have to search this site to try to find out how to keep Vista from changing the folder views after I set them. Thanks!
Thankyou very much for this
works perfectly.
Previous to reading this post I even uninstalled and the reinstalled the whole office suite, and the problem still remained.
I have tried all the mentioned fixes to keep Word 2007 from locking up when being closed – and nothing worked. I tried several registry key changes, uninstalled Adobe Reader and Flash as well as managed Add-Ins.
I found another suggestion which was to make any printer other than an HP printer as the default printer and low and behold – it worked.
when the data key is deleted, it re-creates its-self. i even deleted the data key from the 11.0 folder since i upgraded word 07 from word 03.
i will try the hp fix also and see how that works.
WOW this really worked! i also tried install and reinstalling.. i was desperate to get it to work and nearly resorted to reformating my PC because i needed to do assignments! Great tip. really awesome stuff!!
You saved my life!!
For me, it started when I somehow got an image merged into the Image title… then tried to cross-reference to it (same document on Word 2000, when I inserted the x-ref, it would insert the image as well). Downloaded updates, and it got worse. Didn’t get the mouse or open-from-search problems, but couldn’t save or open or close. Worse, I always got the “recovered documents” window; word crashed on closing this.
Uninstalled and installed.
Naively asked Microsoft for help.
You saved my life!
(I have MathType as well)
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
And to Microsoft….ugggh!!!!!!! WTF!
Thank you! Thank you! I’ve been making due without Word since it is unusable without the mouse functionality. I was about to uninstall and reinstall when I googled the problem and found your information. Regedit and deleting the specified key worked! SO easy.
Worked for me, Nice!
Amoung all our clients, only one experienced this issue of regarding MS Word and the mouse. By the way , all the machines with the problem are XP Pro – no Vista on site. We found that an Add-In by the client was the problem. We accessed Outlook in safe mode (Outlook.exe /safe) and then went to Tools, Options, Other, Advanced Options, Add-in Manger and un-checked the LaserFiche add-in and the problem went away. The client is a Federal Credit Union and uses LaserFiche software, the rest of our client base does not.
Thanks for helping me fix this. The crash dialog was totally useless in helping me fix this. It told me to run office diagnostics that showed nothing wrong. It suggested that I download updates which I already did. How long will it be before M$ fixes this!
You are my savior!! I have a doc I have to get to a client today and Word has stopped working on *all* my machines. It would only let me see the first page of a document and would crash on exit.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you
Pete
to CHRIS BUECHLER (#8)… THANK YOU SO MUCH. I have been struggling with WORD since late August and didn’t have the time to research solution … your step-by-step regedit fix cured my WORD woes.
Thanks Again,
Joan