I run Word 2007 on Vista. Today I hit a curious problem. Word opened, but something was badly wrong. I could not select text with the mouse. The document scroll bar did not work. Word crashed on exit. And going into Options – Addins, I could not navigate beyond the “Popular” section.
After several crashes an Office Diagnostics wizard popped up and offered to help. Kind of it. It chugged through numerous tests and finally told me it could not see anything wrong. Never mind.
Checking the newgroups, I found fellow-sufferers but no solution. I decided to be methodical. I started Word in safe mode. (winword /a). It worked. Probably an add-in. I went to the COM add-ins and tried to disable them. Message: “The connected state of Office add-ins registered in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE cannot be changed”. OK, registry then. Navigated to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins
Found three add-ins listed. I changed the value of the LoadBehavior key from 3 to 0 for each add-in.
Word now worked OK, but still crashed on closing. I found I could restore two of the add-ins without problems. The guilty party: OfficePrintAddIn, a component of Flash Paper.
I had a look at active templates. There was one called FlashPaperWordUITemplate.2302.dot. If I tried to unload it, Word crashed. Perhaps it needs the related COM add-in to be loaded. I closed Word, found the template file, and deleted it. Everything is fine now.
A quicker route might be to uninstall Macromedia Flash Paper, unless you use this of course.
I’m still puzzled about why this problem only showed up today. I’d not made any changes to Flash Paper or Word that I’m aware of. And I don’t blame Macromedia (now Adobe) for this; Word 2007 did not exist when this Flash add-in was released.
Posted in the hope that it saves someone else some time.
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Thank you so much… Works great!
hey man, thanks for this so much
i went to my hkey and found an add in for my snagit, and i changed the value of that one to 0 and also for my other add ins
i know have the mouse capability but it still crashes after closing
btw i’m running windows 7 32bit and Microsoft Office 2007
once again thanks
I too had this problem for a few months but only today finally decided to do something. As I use Snagit, I followed Andre advice, but I deleted the whole Snagit entry in the HK….Word. Did not know what value to change and how (so many value options). The result is the same as Andre posted.