Word 2003/Visual Basic -- is this Defender acting up?

  • Thread starter Thread starter John C. Bunnell
  • Start date Start date
J

John C. Bunnell

Updated Windows Defender today (well, technically yesterday at this hour),
and have run into a peculiar problem with Word 2003 that looks to me as if
it *might* be Defender being overeager -- only if it is, I can't see what
switch to flip in order to appease it.

It's pretty simple: starting Word, and attempting to perform many to most
command actions in Word, produces a dialog box as follows:

Menu bar: "Windows Visual Basic"
Box text: "Code execution has been interrupted."
Buttons: Continue/End/Debug/Help ("Debug" is grayed out)

The dialog box sometimes appears several times in succession, requiring
several clicks of "Continue" to complete whatever it was I wanted to do. It
does not appear that any functionality is actually being lost, but I haven't
tinkered with this too greatly yet.

Software specs:
Word 2003 (11.8026.8028) SP2
WinXP SP 2, fully patched/AutoUpdating

I do have the WOPR plugin for Word installed and running ("Woody's Office
Power Pack", as supplied with the Woody Leonhard/Ed Bott Office 2003 book
from Que), but it hasn't been giving me any trouble before now. My security
in WinWord has been set to High; I tried turning it down to Medium -- which
causes some non-critical issues with WOPR -- but that hasn't helped mitigate
the Visual Basic dialogs.

If this is *not* Windows Defender being overeager, I haven't a clue what it
could be; I haven't installed anything else lately that should be getting
into arguments with Visual Basic. OTOH, the problem seems to be isolated to
Word (I don't get the dialogs when using Internet Explorer or MS Publisher,
for instance).

Any suggestions, guesses, and/or useful advice will be much appreciated.
 
I think that it is more likely to be a registry corruption relating to Word
or VB. Have you recently run any manner of registry cleaner? That could
have initiated the problem.

One solution would be to go back to a restore point that predates the time
the problem was first noticed. Of course, that will eliminate any other
changes you might have made since that time. Nevertheless, that may be the
easiest route to corrective action.
 
I think that it is more likely to be a registry corruption
relating to Word or VB. Have you recently run any
manner of registry cleaner? That could have initiated
the problem.
Click to expand...

No, have not run any registry-cleaning activity lately, at least not unless
McAfee's been a *lot* busier than it has any right to have been. The only
real instability on this system has been an intermittent Stop Error problem
that's always diagnosed as "unknown driver error" (this even though I've
updated all the primary drivers and ditched the ancient parallel-port
scanner; if it really is a driver error, it's impossibly obscure). But
that's been dormant for more than a week, and the VB wackiness is much more
recent.

--
= John C. Bunnell
= (e-mail address removed)
= http://www.sff.net/people/jcbunnell/
= http://djonn.livejournal.com/

"The underground levels include libraries, labs, power
systems, storage, and a half-mile layer of rich
chocolate ganache."
-- an unnamed super-intelligent mutant hamster
 
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