Word 2003 fails to Open

[Bill Armitage]

My sister's laptop has been replaced with my old Millennium PC. She
purchased Windows XP Professional and upgraded to that OS - everything was
OK. She installed her Office 2003 Professional and everything, other than
Word, works perfectly. Word starts to load, displays the Word initial
screen then freezes. It never opens a Word document or even an empty
screen. It did once allow her to open Word in Safe Mode - even this just
displays the Initial Screen then freezes - no Word Screen appears but it did
say that it had recovered Normal.Dot. However, this has not fixed the
problem. I unloaded her version and then installed my own copy of Word 2003
Professional. Again, exactly the same problem. I tried 'fixing problems'
but this didn't work either. Access, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint all open
and work fine - its just Word that won't open (although it tries to, but
freezes). We've been at this for days so any help would be greatly
appreciated.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/ProbsOpeningWord.htm

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

The usual suspects are:

a. Corrupted normal.dot.

b. Corrupted registry entry (usually the Data key)

c. Some other interfering/malfunctioning addin.

Try the steps shown here:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQS/AppErrors/ProbsOpeningWord.htm

 

[Bill Armitage]

Many thanks for responding and giving me a number of possible problem areas
to investigate. I don't know if these will fix it but I suspect that
Normal.Dot may be the problem. Does Word create its own Normal.Dot (if none
exists or I rename it) or is Normal.Dot installed from the Office 2003
Professional CD when Office is installed? Is it possible that an older
version of Normal.Dot is on this old PC causing all the problems?

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Word is genetically programmed to create/recreate normal.dot when it needs
to save certain user customizations and an existing normal.dot can't be
found (one isn't installed... Word is "born" knowing how to make one from
scratch).

Yes... it's possible that the problems are being caused by an
older/problematic version of normal.dot.

There are two kinds of normal.dot: those that contain some kind of
corruption, and those that don't [yet]. Eventually, in my experience, all
normal.dot files become corrupted at one time or another. I routinely back
mine up so that I have a not-terribly-old fallback position when I need one.

--
Herb Tyson MS MVP
Author of the Word 2007 Bible
Blog: http://word2007bible.herbtyson.com
Web: http://www.herbtyson.com