Issue with Word 2007 Crashing on Vista

Every since I rebuilt my laptop at work to Windows Vista I have been getting intermittent errors when opening Word 2007. I tried to live with it as long as I could BUT I I was finally fed up with it and started to do a little research on the web to see if there was a fix. As I was searching I found a forum that gave me something to try…

http://forums.techguy.org/archive-business-applications/584360-solved-word-2007-vista-crash.html

The solution suggested I make a registry hack and at first I’m a little nervous at hacking the registry.  Since one wrong move and you can really mess up your computer.  However with Word 2007 continuing to crash at random intervals and seem to be happening more often, I decided to take a chance and proceed with the recommended solution.  However I took some precautions with my registry just in case something got corrupted during the process.

Here is a link to show you how to back up your registry on Vista…

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Back-up-the-registry

I then followed the instructions from the forum… see below

  • Start…Run… type in regedit
  • Then follow the path HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Office/12.0/Word
  • Then change the folder called Data to OldData
  • Then change the folder called options to OldOptionsWhen you open up Word again it creates new files to replace the old

After doing this I still received the same error so I logged out and logged back in and this seemed to fix Word to open properly again. Time will tell if this is a permanent fix but so far so good. I will try to update my blog after a few months to see if this fix truly worked or not.

John Hart
ImageSource, Inc.