Office glitch

[FSH42NA]

I just finished upgrading my sis in law's pc and am having a PITA problem with Office 2000 and Office XP (I've tried both). Original disc were used for both of these installations (only one installed at a time). The OS is XP pro which slipstreamed with SP3.

The problem is I can't Word to run. When we click on Word, it starts with the opening screen and just sits there with the hourglass forever. If I start Excel, Access, Powerpoint, no problems at all. I uninstalled Office and reinstalled thinking there was just some phantom glitch that would go away, but it remained. This has me pulling my hairs. I took extra steps to test all hardware: memory, drives, etc before putting the PC together.

The kicker is I took the same OS and Office disc to test on a POS ECS system I'm putting together for a family friend and everything works fine.

My sis in law's system is:

Gigabyte P35 DQ4
E6600 C2D at stock
Artic Cooler heatsink
4gb (2x2gb) Adata DDR2 6400
XFX 8600GT video with Zalman cooler
Samsung/Philips DVD burner
250gb Samsung SATA drive (OS)
500gb x 2 Seagate SATA drives for data/photos
Corsair VX550 power supply
Antec 300 case
XP pro slipstreamed sp3

Please chime in with suggestions. I've never had this happen before and it's driving me nuts.

Thanks

 

[NeoV]

just re-install it

 

[FSH42NA]

Originally posted by: NeoV
just re-install it

As I said in my post, I did reinstall it - no go.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Try asking on the Microsoft SP3 forums or somewhere like Channel9 or whatever.
If a full reinstall + application of the office service packs & patches doesn't leave it in a usable state, you're pretty much out of luck unless you start tweaking things at a low level registry / command prompt to try to overcome its startup processing.

While one is stuck opening, maybe you can open a 2nd one?
Maybe if you "run as administrator" it...
or if you create a new / different account on the box with or without (try both?) administrator status and try running word from those to see if it starts better?

You could always give OpenOffice Writer a try for document reading / preparation.. the 3.x version is very near to release (RC1 is out).. and it works fine for most purposes.

You could try starting it and killing it 100 times and setting your system clock forward 1 year to see if that changes the startup actions related to activation checking (assuming you haven't already been able to / or chosen to activate it).

You could probably even try to install Word or the office suite with a *known* invalid / blacklisted key just *so* it'll "immediately" kick you out of the normal start-up routine and ask for a replacement key or something after which it might work...

 

[corkyg]

When you reinstalled, did you first uninstall?

 

[QuixoticOne]

http://wordprocessing.about.co...ips/qt/normalstart.htm
Check that and also the related articles listed:
Related Articles

* Troubleshooting Word -- Problems With Word's Registry Entry
* Using Safe Mode to Diagnose Word Startup Problems
* Troubleshooting Word With the Support.dot Template
* Microsoft Word -- Word Files Won't Open in Word
* Troubleshooting Word With the Support.dot Template

 

[FSH42NA]

yup, went through add/remove programs to 1st uninstall it and reinstalled.

 

[FSH42NA]

Originally posted by: QuixoticOne

http://wordprocessing.about.co...ips/qt/normalstart.htm
Check that and also the related articles listed:
Related Articles

* Troubleshooting Word -- Problems With Word's Registry Entry
* Using Safe Mode to Diagnose Word Startup Problems
* Troubleshooting Word With the Support.dot Template
* Microsoft Word -- Word Files Won't Open in Word
* Troubleshooting Word With the Support.dot Template

Thanks for the link. Lots of useful info there.

Question though, how does this file get corrupted? Never had this problem before.

 

[QuixoticOne]

I don't know; I've never encountered those particular problems, I use MS Office only rarely.
I've heard of other OGA / WGA (their online activation scheme) problems making it so Word / Office couldn't start or activate, but the details of those situations aren't so clear to me at the moment.
I suppose you could download Microsoft's OGA/WGA diagnostics program and see if it has problems.

IIRC the suggestion in that case was to delete some file or other and then run the program.

Originally posted by: FSH42NA

Thanks for the link. Lots of useful info there.

Question though, how does this file get corrupted? Never had this problem before.

 

[FSH42NA]

This is one weird situation. Never had it happen to me. I just install it, type the cd key and off I go. Thanks for your suggestions and assistance.