Word 2007 “Not Responding” in Vista
I ran into a problem on a faculty member’s laptop yesterday afternoon where Microsoft Word 2007 would lock up and say “Not Responding” every time it was launched. Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint did not have this problem – only Word. After uninstalling/reinstalling Office 2007 and doing some other general troubleshooting, it became obvious that some settings directly related to this application alone were corrupt and needed to be fixed. While this problem seems to only affect machines running Windows Vista, it may work on other versions of Windows as well. Here’s what I did to fix the issue:
1. Click on Start and type “regedit” in the search field and press enter.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
3. Right mouse click on the “Data” folder and delete it.
4. The next time you open Microsoft Word 2007, this information will be re-created and won’t be corrupt.
on November 11, 2009 at 11:59 am
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Thank you so much, this was an easy fix to a BIG problem!
on November 12, 2009 at 6:19 pm
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I'm impressed. Word was misbehaving (as it always does), but this time it wouldn't work at all. Your tip got my wretched software back to its normal works-most-of-the-time mode. My question is: just what, exactly, does following your tip do to make things work again (sort of)?
Thanks for the hel;
on November 12, 2009 at 5:46 pm
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Thank you!
on November 14, 2009 at 1:22 pm
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I was terribly upset that my word started misbehaving. My work was suffering very much. No microsoft guy was able to give a defenite answer as to how and why this is happening. I did as you said and it started working fine. I am so relieved. Thanks mate!
on November 18, 2009 at 4:32 pm
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Thanks very much. such an easy fix. I was worried i had to re-install Office, now luckily i dont.