Annoying Word 2007 problem: can’t select text

By tim, on February 23rd, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

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.

Technorati tags: office2007, flash paper

Rate this post

Rating: 10.0/10 (3 votes cast)

Game

January 12, 2010 at 5:50 am

Thank you so much… Works great!

andre mota

January 16, 2010 at 3:16 am

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

Gianni Pisch

January 20, 2010 at 1:15 pm

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.

Tim Muecke

February 21, 2010 at 3:16 am

thanks – had/have exactly the same issue and this is the first useful suggestions. I’m still concerned about the fact Word doesn’t close cleanly (restarts). Suggests to me that there is a background library problem. I’ll keep looking, but at least I can now work on my assignment.

Peter Abramowitsch

March 9, 2010 at 4:07 am

I too am having problems with word 2007 crashing on close. We develop our own addin for Word and have never had as many problems as now. A sure way to create a crash on close is to try to disable/re-enable the vertical scrollbar. Whether doing this by “hand” in the options panel or programmatically, it sets up Word for a crash as soon as you close the document. I’m worried that there is a memory corruption issue that is endemic to Word 2007 itself.

Has anyone definitively solved a crash-on-close problem once it has appeared?

- P

ONEz

April 5, 2010 at 5:58 pm

Just had the same problem. the solution can be found here

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;940791

Michael M

April 6, 2010 at 4:49 pm

I simply went to Add/Remove Programs control panel, selected Snag-It, and x-ed out all the add-in options. My mouse text selection is back to normal. Thanks to Andre for making the SnagIt addin connection.