Word 2007 is repeatedly locking up - "not responding" after I edit a dozen
sources in the references source manager. It is slow to update and then locks
up completely. Why am I having to debug this feature? I've now spent 2 hours
trying to enter the same information in to update my source entries. HELP.
I'm adding dates and publisher data to existing entries. Why is this such a
big deal that Word can't handle it?
Are you sure it is not responding at all? Try waiting a while and see
what it does. Still the behaviour is not what it should be.
Whenever you enter / edit an existing source in your Word document a
couple of things happen. Firstly, all citation fields within your Word
document are checked and updated if required. That might take a while.
Secondly, it checks your current master list to see if the source is
already in there. If so, it asks permission to overwrite it, if not,
it adds it automatically. Note that even if you don't save the
document you just created the citation in, the source will still be
saved to the master list. The larger your master list gets, the slower
the updating process becomes.
One suggestion I have is trying to create a new empty master source
list. The easiest way is by renaming the current one. The default one
is located at "%appdata%\microsoft\Bibliography\" and is named
"sources.xml". If you rename it to "sources2.xml" for example, a new
one empty one will be created by Word when required.
If Word really hangs, it might be worth checking out if you have
permission to write to the sources.xml file mentioned in the previous
paragraph. Maybe Word keeps trying to write to a location it can't and
hangs. I doubt that is the case, but you never know.
Yves
