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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Office\\Word\\Addins<\/p>\n
Found three add-ins listed. I changed the value of the LoadBehavior key from 3 to 0 for each add-in.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A quicker route might be to uninstall Macromedia Flash Paper, unless you use this of course.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Posted in the hope that it saves someone else some time.<\/p>\n
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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 … Continue reading Annoying Word 2007 problem: can’t select text<\/span>