Word 2003 crashes - novice question

XP Home, Office Pro 2003 (obtained from TechSoup through Microsoft donation
program, so no support without paying a steep charge). Word crashes soon
after opening. Other apps work OK (Excel, etc.). Started today.
Coincidentally(?) PC was shut down last night with USB thumb drive inserted,
may have had a Word document open at the time. The PC is used by my boss and
she's not sure what was open or not open on the drive. PC was turned on this
morning with the drive still in it with black screen message to remove and
press any key etc.

Event log shows errors starting only since this morning. Event ID 1000 -
Faulting application winword.exe, version 11.0.8106.0, stamp 44f8a192,
faulting module ophc_ui.dll, version 1.2.7.0, stamp 42b77c20, debug? 0, fault
address 0x0003ae8f.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

The knowledge base link yields no info. Tried "detect and repair" with no
success. Tried System Restore to three different recent days, dates in bold,
"system checkpoint" - "System Restore Failed".

What can I do next? Try repairing from the Office 2003 CD?

Actually Excel is now crashing too. Guess I willl have to reinstall Office
and then get the 200 or so necessary updates again. Ah, Microsoft. . .

Uninstalled with CD. Reinstalled with CD "successfully". Installed all
updates online. STILL CRASHES on opening!

Tried "repair and detect" from CD - "successful". Still crashes. Tried
"reinstall" from CD - "successful". Still crashes. Excel seems stable but
Word and Publisher crash on both of the user accounts.

Can anyone help?

try a few things and report your
findings back to us:

in normal mode hold down the
ctrl key and click open one of the
office programs until you get a message
about the key you are pressing.

see how the program works afterwards.

then go into safemode and see how the
office program works in there too.

then go into safemode w/networking and
see how the office program works in there
as well?

THANK YOU FOR RESPONDING.

It's XP Pro, not Home, if it makes a difference.

With the control key pressed, I opened Word. Message - " Word has
detectedthat you are holding down CTRL key. Do you want to start Word in safe
mode?" Chose yes. Program opened and crashed - "Microsoft Word has
encountered a problem. . . sorry for inconvenience. . ." etc.

After starting in Safe Mode - seems to work fine! Same in Safe mode with
networking.

I won't be able to get back to the PC till tomorrow but thanks so much for
responding.

Not sure if the last post was clear. Word still crashes except when the PC
is started in safe mode or safe mode with networking. I guess tomorrow I
will be looking for some conflict that only occurs in normal mode - ?

I meant to rate your post at 2/25/2007 3:26 PM PST as helpful, but what I did
was click "yes" the post answered my question. Sorry about that.

Try Search for and Rename ALL "normal.dot" files to notmal.OLD and then
start Word to recreate. (make sure you look in System and Hidden folders)

ok, so if word starts ok
in safemode, then we now know
there is a third party driver in the
normal mode environment.

here are a few things i would do to
eliminate some of the causes. There
are others afterwards, if these do
not work.

first, go back into safemode as this is
a safe environment to do the tweaking.

in safemode, go ahead and temporarily
disable your startups. These are programs
that are pre started and one of them
may be hampering office. To do this
go to start, run and msconfig. Then in
the startup tab, disable all of them. You
can enable them later.

Next open word again and check to see
that it is not trying to access the internet
automatically. I don't recall the exactly how
but basically go to tools, preference and drill down the options and look for something
like "services". Somewhere there will be an
option to check for something or another
on the internet....

Next, simply double check that your
page file / virtual memory is not set
to low. Windows is pretty good at managing pagefile except when it gets too
low. Set it with a custom size of min 2 and
max 1152.

then reboot the system into normal mode,
be sure your internet connection is turned off and launch word.

see what happens....

First, let me say I'm sorry for the delayed response. I'm at the mercy of
the office staff as to when I'm able to access the PCs.

I disabled the startups in Safe Mode. I couldn't find any clear way to stop
Word from accessing the internet automatically but I took the PC off the
network and also unchecked "update automatic links at open" in
Tools|Options|General.

The page file was already set to intial 744 max 1488 so I left it there.

Still closes shortly after opening in Normal Mode.

Besides Word, Access, Publisher, and PowerPoint all crash shortly after
opening, either when clicking on something or before anything is attempted.
Only Excel seems stable. To my inexperienced mind, the Safe Mode success
implies a conflict from outside Office(?) but might there be a way to more
thoroughly remove any corrupted elements associated with Office?. I
uninstalled and reinstalled using the CD; maybe Add/Remove might be better?
Or some other method or utility?

Thanks for the response, Bob. Sorry for my delayed response but the PC's
user (my boss) was not able to let me back to it right away. I tried your
suggestion with no success. Also, most if not all of the other Office
programs crash too. I wonder if the flash drive left in the PC during
shutdown and startup could be a cause or just a coincidence?

removing the thumb drive may be the answer. Has the thumb drive been
used as a direct storage target from the problematic applications?

set you pagefile/virtual memory
to custom size of min 2 and max 1152
reboot and retry....

I am - it's NOT good usenet "netiquette" to post in HTML - as I said, there
are MANY news readers (and most regulars USE news readers not the web
interface that you use) that can't read HTML.....

Please refrain from posting HTML - many news readers won't see it....

if Microsoft wants to implement a text
format limitation for their newsgroup, then
they can make an update.

however, it's all good

if Microsoft wants to implement a text
format limitation for their newsgroup, then
they can make an update.

Nothing to do with Microsoft - just stop posting in HTML and use PLAIN
TEXT.....apart from anything else, it buggers up the quoting....

i can understand your problem.

however, if there is non microsoft programs
that are unable to read my information,
then i am not concerned that my replies
are not readiable by them....

similarly, if i cannot read their postings
because my microsoft products can't translate their data for me, then i doesn't bother me as well....