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.
Does this fix work for powerpoint too… if I delete HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Powerpoint\Data registry subkey?
I am a fix novice… please let me know!
The Word fix worked great, thanks for that!
I honestly don’t know, Julie. But I don’t think it will hurt for you to try. Office rebuilds this key if necessary. You can ensure that no damage occurs by creating a system restore point first. If anything goes wrong, just restore to the snapshot you created.
I was extremely close to rebuilding the Windows profile for the user who was experiencing this issue, though in XP. Refusing to give up, I found your solution and it worked magnificently!
Thanks so much for the extremely valuable information. Praises be upon you, mang!
The regedit fix works, but eventually the error comes back. I think this may happen once a new document is started and saved. Is there anything we can do besides deleting this “data” folder everytime the error starts again?
I was working on my dissertation today when this error hit me…. I almost started to cry. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR PROVIDING A SOLUTION!!!
I was updrading all sorts of programs on two of my Citrix servers this weekend… when I was done, one had this type of error on Word close, the other didn’t.
Since /safe and /a worked, I thought it was one of my programs that installed an add-in, but even disabled, the error kept haunting me.
Found this article (after much toil with uninstalls and reinstalls) and it took care of it just like that.
Thanks to you, I might actually be able to enjoy the rest of this weekend…
Thanks again,
John
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you!!!!
Thanks so much Ed!!! It has been a painful 2 weeks trying to figure this out! And thanks to Chris for explaining how to get to the registry! What a disguised simple fix!! Thank you!!
Thanks you really helped me out on this one! It was driving me nuts
Thank you! Could not figure this out and this was exactly my issue.
Thank YOU!!!
Thank you so much, this was giving me such a headache, again thanks for the quick fix, everything works perfectly now.
Awesome!!! That helped me to get rid of the stupid problem…
Thank you Ed!
Good god – you’re awesome! This just occured to my vista ultimate machine w/ word 2007. Exported the key (just in case), then deleted the key and restarted word – voila – mystery problem solved (office diagnostics were no help…).
Mine occured after the 11/13/08 updated and auto restart with Word running…
A simple thanks is in order.
DANG DUDE YOU’RE MY HERO !!!!
THIS WAS DRIVIN ME CRAZY !!!!!
Thanks! Ive been dealing with issue for a few months and always said I would look into so today I did,this was the first post I found and it worked like a charm!
Thank You!
RJ
I had a similar problem – crash on exit, as long as I had saved a document. If I didn’t save, it didn’t crash – but what good is that? I tried the registry fix, to no avail. However, this morning Vista finally turned up a solution for me. The problem, apparently, was caused by “a known issue with your HP printer.” Which begs the question why the hell don’t they fix this KNOWN ISSUE? To resolve this I had to set a different printer as default (one of the virtual ones) and now I have to select the my HP from the menu whenever I actually want to print anything! What gives, eh?
I had the same problem as MindStrider, and my problem also resolved after changing the default printer. How weird.