Installing SP3 for Office 2003 crashes Word

Installed SP3 for Office 2003 on a system running XP Pro. Word will then
crash if opened, opens OK in safe mode. Behavior verified by reinstalling
Office. Word then opens correctly. Behavior on installing SP3 is
repeatable. Has anyone found a cause or fix for this?

Its fine here.
Do you have any word addins?

I have addins for EndNote 10, Mathtype, Robohelp.

I too am running Office 2003 under XP-Pro w/all updates and encountered no
issues with Word. On the other hand, both "Microsoft Office Document
Imaging" and Microsoft Office Document Scanning" utilities have failed since
the installation of SP3. Possible cause -- see the post under "Office SP3
removes TIF and TIFF registered file type extensions" -- however, I'm still
trouble shooting.

I run winXPpro and Office2003 (with hebrew) on two computers. The first
upgraded successfully and the second crushes Word/Frontpage/Publisher
programs. I could get word and frontpage to work by disabling spelling.

I have the exact same problem. Uninstalling and reinstalling Office
2003 fixes the problem. Subsequently applying SP3 causes the problem
to reoccur. Outlook will also refuse to use Word as an editor,
claiming that Word is not installed, or an incompatible version is
installed.

Anybody find a solution for this?

It seems to work fine here. Do you have any Word add-ins installed? Can you
try opening Word in Safe Mode? Go to Start | Run, type winword.exe /a This
starts Word without any add-ins loaded. If it works, it's probably a
conflict with SP3 and an add-in.

If you are seeing this issue, I need your crash bucket number.

Here's how you can locate it.
http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/archiv...25/606732.aspx

Thank you. This will help track down the problem.

I am also seeing this issue. Running Vista and Office2003. Word2003 crashes
on startup after installing SP3. Starts OK using run: winword.exe /a
How can I disable add ins if unable to start Word?
Fault bucket 517604011, type 1

I've passed this information along and will post back here if I
hear anything.

[mohdsubaie]

I had exactly the same problem. I deleted the normal.dot file and that sorted the problem. :)

[abreups]

I also had the same problem and deleting normal.dot fixed it immediately!
Great hint!