Excel & Word Crashes

[AlexTri]

Within our company we use Office XP and 2003 and on a number of users
machines Word and Excel crash when saving certain documents. It also appears
that it is begining to effect more people on random documents other that the
specific documents I know of. Originaly I put it down to our network
printers and possible corrupt drivers so I removed the printers from the
problem machines and still no joy.

There type of error recieved is as follows:

The document *****.doc caused a serious error the last time it was opened.
would you like to continue opening it?

This is the same sort of error message received in both Word and excel. I
tried opening these documents in OpenOffice and they opened fine.

Below is a few event logs:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Microsoft Office 10
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1000
Date: 28/04/2008
Time: 17:06:02
User: N/A
Computer: 7Y9H11J
Description:
Faulting application excel.exe, version 10.0.2614.0, faulting module
excel.exe, version 10.0.2614.0, fault address 0x00023414.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 65 78 63 ure exc
0018: 65 6c 2e 65 78 65 20 31 el.exe 1
0020: 30 2e 30 2e 32 36 31 34 0.0.2614
0028: 2e 30 20 69 6e 20 65 78 .0 in ex
0030: 63 65 6c 2e 65 78 65 20 cel.exe
0038: 31 30 2e 30 2e 32 36 31 10.0.261
0040: 34 2e 30 20 61 74 20 6f 4.0 at o
0048: 66 66 73 65 74 20 30 30 ffset 00
0050: 30 32 33 34 31 34 0d 0a 023414..


Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Hang
Event Category: (101)
Event ID: 1002
Date: 01/05/2008
Time: 10:14:02
User: N/A
Computer: HS6783J
Description:
Hanging application WINWORD.EXE, version 11.0.8202.0, hang module hungapp,
version 0.0.0.0, hang address 0x00000000.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 48 61 6e 67 ion Hang
0010: 20 20 57 49 4e 57 4f 52 WINWOR
0018: 44 2e 45 58 45 20 31 31 D.EXE 11
0020: 2e 30 2e 38 32 30 32 2e .0.8202.
0028: 30 20 69 6e 20 68 75 6e 0 in hun
0030: 67 61 70 70 20 30 2e 30 gapp 0.0
0038: 2e 30 2e 30 20 61 74 20 .0.0 at
0040: 6f 66 66 73 65 74 20 30 offset 0
0048: 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 0000000

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated as it is beggining to effect
the productivity of some of our users

 

[Tom B.]

Hi AlexTri,

What troubleshooting steps have you taken?

Questions about your environment:

Have all released Microsoft patches for Office been applied to the client?
Do you use virus scanner with updated definition files?
Do you use a mixed version office environment, for instance, Office 2007
Standard with Access or Project 2000 or 2003? I know that if Office Standard
2003 is installed and then Access 2000 is installed after it that the
Spellcheck dictionary files are overwritten with the older version causing
Word to crash immediately when opened.
Have you tried creating a new profile for the user and try duplicating that
issue, or have another user without the issue login to the PC with the issue
and see if you can duplicate it?
Have you tried renaming any files in the xlstart folder for excel and the
normal.dot for word to see if it resolves the issue?
Are macros used in your environment?
Is the Office Document Converter pack installed?

I know this is not a solution, but I hope this helps identify the problem.

 

[AlexTri]

Hi Tom B

Thanks for replying.

The troubleshooting steps that I have taken so far have been to open Office
Apps in safe mode - no joy :-(, Open and Repair document(s) - no joy, opening
on other machines - no joy.

Questions about your environment:

Have all released Microsoft patches for Office been applied to the client?

All machines are fully patched with the latest updates

Do you use virus scanner with updated definition files?

All virus software definitions are up-to-date (we're using Symantec Client
Security)

Do you use a mixed version office environment, for instance, Office 2007
Standard with Access or Project 2000 or 2003? I know that if Office Standard
2003 is installed and then Access 2000 is installed after it that the
Spellcheck dictionary files are overwritten with the older version causing
Word to crash immediately when opened.

I think in some instances there may well be a mix of Office versions
installed so I will check some of the machines and see if this is the case.
We do use Outlook 2003 throught the company on every machine and then on some
machines there are Office XP apps installed instead of Office 2003. However,
there are also a few PowerPoint 2000's installed on random machines.

Have you tried creating a new profile for the user and try duplicating that
issue, or have another user without the issue login to the PC with the issue
and see if you can duplicate it?

I have also tried deleting the user profile and re-creating it however this
didn't work either. I haven't tried logging in on the problem machine as
another user so I could try this.

Have you tried renaming any files in the xlstart folder for excel and the
normal.dot for word to see if it resolves the issue?

There doesn't seem to be any files in the xlstart folder and our normal.dot
is actually part of a company wide templates folder

Are macros used in your environment?

No macros used

Is the Office Document Converter pack installed?

On some machines (Office 2007 Converter pack)

I know this is not a solution, but I hope this helps identify the problem.

Like I said in my first post it is strange that OpenOffice opens the
documents but MS Office doesn't

 

[Chuck]

"our normal.dot
is actually part of a company wide templates folder"

This may be a small part of the problem, since it seems that you have mixed
versions using the various templates.

Another possibility that I've encountered had to do with various addons that
some companies insist on. These ranged from "network management/"big daddy
is watching" backgound software to various user "helpers".

 

[Tom B.]

Ok, try those things, and then reply with the result.

In the meantime, I thought of a couple more things:

If you take the document that caused the crash on one machine to another
machine, does it also cause the crash? If you're dealing with a data-related
issue you might have to look at what features are being used in the document.
Is it being saved only as a .doc, or was it saved previously as another
version document (Office 2000 or earlier)? Are there embedded objects in the
document, if so, what are they? Recently there have been a couple patches
released from MS for certain ActiveX controls, and this may have affected
certain embedded documents. Take a look at various MS patches for this year
(MS08-xxx). It might also help to find out when this behavior started
happening to get a timeline going. Then you can inspect PC's that have the
issue to see when patches were applied.

 

[AlexTri]

Thanks again for your response Tom B (and Chuck)

I will try these steps over the course of the day and see what happens. I
will also have a look into the MS patches to see if this could be a possible
cause.

Thanks again