MS Word is Dead

[lpc300]

Hi all,

Amoungst my many jobs at work, it is my responsibility to keep all the computers running. Tough job considering that many I work with are barely computer literate. Three days ago, upon arriving, I was told that Word would no longer open no matter what one did. I clicked the desktop icon, the splash screen showed, and then nothing. Entire system failed to respond, requiring a hard reboot (surge protector turned off). Tried opening Word by clicking any Word document. Same thing. Tried opening it by clicking the Winword icon in the Microsoft Office folder. Same. The coworker that discovered the problem told me that she had been working on a document and had deleted it. Instead of deleting it from inside Word, however, she deleted a shortcut that she had placed on her desktop. She's not sure if she accidentally deleted the Word shortcut, too (I have seen havoc created when doing this to MS programs). I'm planning on using the Office repair tool and/or reinstalling Word, but any suggestion on how to repair it would be appreciated.

By the way, it's Office 2000 Pro w/Win98SE.

Thanks in advance.

[Nuclear Krusader]

Perhaps the word executable file gone missing. Reinstall or repair, and see if it works. Though data is not touched by installers I'd do a backup of the important files.

[lpc300]

Thanks for the quick response, Nuclear Krusader. I'm pretty sure your right. Work's been real busy (my REAL job as a therapist) and I haven't had time to really look at things, but I'm betting that the .exe file is gone. Not too worried about the files. Lotus WordPro is also installed on the machine and it opens all the documents flawlessly. They're all backed up anyway to a Zip disk.

[Tuf]

I have seen three things cause this, I'm sure there probably are others as well. If the Normal.dot document becomes corrupted it will cause behavior such as this. Just search it up and delete it, Word will create a new copy on it's own. In some configurations installing NAV or Adobe Acrobat can cause this to happen as well. It doesn't always happen, but there are registry hacks and/or patches posted on their respective web sites.