Font change causes App Error in Excel and Word

  • Thread starter Thread starter JB
  • Start date Start date
J

JB

I have Office 2003 on Win 2000. No clue what has changed,
or what may be root cause.. I tried repairing Office
install, no improvement. I will uninstall/reinstall, but
if anyone recognizes a known problem, any tips will cure
and prevent huge headaches.. with huge appreciation..

Word crashes on start now, but it used to open an existing
doc (via doc open in Windows), allowing brief edit time
(unless a font changed is applied, causing immediate
crash), before crashing on its own with an app error via
the error reporting feature. One time it asked whether to
start in safe mode, which I attempted, but it still
crashed.

Excel is more consitent, perhaps easier to troubleshoot. I
can start Excel, with new or existing workbook. Excel is
stable until I try to apply a font change (bold, color,
conditional formatting, etc).. then it crashes (with
successful recovery) just like Word with the error
reporting feature. Funny thing is, the recovered document
now contains the formatting I tried applying which causes
the crash. Also, I can copy/paste formatting without Excel
crashing, I just can't apply new formatting.

I thought Word/Excel may be crashing whenever they access
installed font data, but they still crash whether I've
removed all add-on fonts, or reinstalled them.. As I said
Office install-repair was ineffective.

Clearly the root problem could be within Win 2000 itself.
I've installer Win 2000 SUpport Tools hoping I might find
a clue in that direction.. I will also try "upgrading" my
Win 2k to Win 2K (since no repair option is offered).

Needless to say, I've scoured MS and Google with every
search I can contrive, but here I am.. failing to think of
another good troubleshooting step..

Any ideas?
 
Found something..

Changing fonts (or attribs like bold, ital, color, cond
formating, etc) within Word and Excel caused App Errors.
Eventually, Word (and Wordpad I found) crashed on open.
Deleting NORMAL.DOT did not help. Nor did
removing/replacing fonts. Oddly, copying/pasting
formatting caused no errors in Excel.

Inspired by others' accounts (word crashes on open, but no
mention of font problems), finally I tried printer
testing. My default printer was on the network, and
sometimes unavailable. Setting an available default
printer (such as to file or to FreePDF, my favorite! ;)
subdued the font symptoms and crashing problems..

At least that's a start.

Office 2003 (if not Windows 2K) has a serious problem
dealing with printers (on network?), but I still haven't
found a root cause or MS solution. Any tips or refs??

These font symptoms seem to be rarely noticed and
described.. made for tough searching, at least for me,
which is unusual..

Hope this saves someone else so much searching..

JB

P.S. Dang, what's with the SPAM from h3ll off this site..
glad I never leave home-page without a disposable email
address -- I trashed the one I used here in the first 20
minutes.. Anyone else thinking that if MS cared they'd
support hidden addresses?
 
Hi,

[snip]
Inspired by others' accounts (word crashes on open, but no
mention of font problems), finally I tried printer
testing. [snip]
Office 2003 (if not Windows 2K) has a serious problem
dealing with printers (on network?), but I still haven't
found a root cause or MS solution. Any tips or refs??
Click to expand...

Any further followup or information on this one?
I am sitting with the same problem at the moment?
 
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