Has anyone noticed in the last couple of days that Word hangs ?

[Guest]

Since Tuesday, word has been hanging when trying to open a document.

 

[garfield-n-odie]

I doubt the rest of the world has had this problem since Tuesday,
and because the rest of the world does not revolve around you
(sorry to be the bearer of the truth), the rest of the world
probably has not noticed that you may have experienced this
problem in the last couple of days.

Version of Word? Version of Windows? Standalone computer or
network? Does the problem occur with one particular document, or
with all existing documents, or with all new documents, or ???

A few possibilities come to mind:
1. Right-click on the My Computer icon on the Windows
desktop, left-click on Disconnect Network Drive, and disconnect
any mapped drives that are not currently available.
2. If you are using Symantec/Norton Antivirus, try disabling
the Office Plugin that comes with it. See
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=329820 "How to use Office
programs with the Norton AntiVirus Office plug-in" for more
information.
3. See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=830561 "Documents
that have attached templates take a long time to open in Word
2002 and in Word 2003".

 

[Guest]

Ok, I will be more specific. First, I am a help desk manager at a
corporation. We have automatic updates for Symantec and the Windows Updates.
We are all on Win XP. Some of us are using Office 2003 and others are using
Office XP. The common thread seems to be documents that are on the Network.
Even downloading them to the hard drive and then trying to launch them will
take Word about 5 minutes to launch. It doesn't matter if Word is already
open or not, it still runs slow. Opening a Word document on Internet
Explorer freezes IE.

We started getting complaints on Tuesday of this week. More complaints came
in on Wed. We have tested this ourselves in the technical dept and the same
thing happens. We have checked Symantec which we have the Enterprise version
of and there is nothing there regarding the Office Plug in to turn off. We
have checked Office Update to see if some update was recently done that is
causing this problem.

Posting this out here was my way to see if anyone else was having problems
with Word or even Excel being very slow.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Ok, I will be more specific. First, I am a help desk manager at a
corporation. We have automatic updates for Symantec and the Windows Updates.
We are all on Win XP. Some of us are using Office 2003 and others are using
Office XP. The common thread seems to be documents that are on the Network.
Even downloading them to the hard drive and then trying to launch them will
take Word about 5 minutes to launch. It doesn't matter if Word is already
open or not, it still runs slow. Opening a Word document on Internet
Explorer freezes IE.

We started getting complaints on Tuesday of this week. More complaints came
in on Wed. We have tested this ourselves in the technical dept and the same
thing happens. We have checked Symantec which we have the Enterprise version
of and there is nothing there regarding the Office Plug in to turn off. We
have checked Office Update to see if some update was recently done that is
causing this problem.

Posting this out here was my way to see if anyone else was having problems
with Word or even Excel being very slow.

This sounds like the kind of problem you get when documents are based
on templates that are stored on a server, and that server either goes
offline or has been renamed. Word waits for a response from the server
until a timeout occurs. Did anything like that happen to a server on
your network on Tuesday?

 

[Guest]

Well, we read some problems from another site and it seems that there is a
bug in using a template. When you save the doc, it stores in Templates and
Add-ins the original location from which it came. In my case, it came from a
server that was shut down as of friday. We have done a temporary fix where
we changed the ds name from the older server to point to the new server.
This is only temporary. The fix from Microsoft prevents this from happening
again but the old docs already created have the information stored in them
still pointing to the old server. We understand MS has a fix we can
run...hopefully to help fix documents already created. We have contacted
them.

 

[Charles Kenyon]

Graham Mayor posted the following solution in November 2004. I expect that
it works but haven't tried it.

You could run the following macro on a folder and it will apply the normal
template to all the documents in that folder. Enter the path to normal.dot
in the relevant place near the end of the macro to reflect your own
installation:

Sub ApplyNormalTemplate()
Dim myFile As String
Dim PathToUse As String
Dim myDoc As Document

With Dialogs(wdDialogCopyFile)
If .Display <> 0 Then
PathToUse = .Directory
Else
MsgBox "Cancelled by User"
Exit Sub
End If
End With

If Documents.Count > 0 Then
Documents.Close Savechanges:=wdPromptToSaveChanges
End If

If Left(PathToUse, 1) = Chr(34) Then
PathToUse = Mid(PathToUse, 2, Len(PathToUse) - 2)
End If

myFile = Dir$(PathToUse & "*.doc")

While myFile <> ""
Set myDoc = Documents.Open(PathToUse & myFile)
ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate = "D:\Word Templates\normal.dot"

myDoc.Close Savechanges:=wdSaveChanges
myFile = Dir$()
Wend
End Sub

See http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm

-
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>

Hope this helps,

--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide


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This message is posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies
and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn
from my ignorance and your wisdom.

 

[Guest]

Months after this post (1/3/06), after updating Office 2003 and Norton
Internet Security, I found that Word 2003 would not fully open at all unless
I either
1) opened it from the command line with add-ins disabled ("winword.exe /a"),
or
2) ran Microsoft Office Application Recovery each time.

With method 2, opening a file from within Word would again cause it to hang.
Sometimes I would eventually get a Help message about a problem with virus
scanning.

I used a suggestion at the MVP site to disable Norton's Office Add-in (on
the Miscellaneous page of Norton Anti-virus options), and now Word opens
properly. I DON'T get the message about files being checked for viruses when
they're opened, but at least they can be opened.