For the last couple of days, I can’t open Word documents on my office computer. I click on the document, get the little hour glass and the first Word screen (small one as the program tries to load) then nothing else happens. My START button doesn’t work, no other icons work etc. If I try CTRL-ALT-DEL to quit Word, I get a message telling me that my system is “dangerously low on resources”, do I want to quit Word? From then on, it’s too low on resources to do anything. I have to shut down manually by pressing the button. BTW-- this is a Win 98 machine about 4 years old, and it has PLENTY of memory. I don’t multitask it heavily either.
Any suggestions? I’m wondering if my copy of Word got corrupted and I should reinstall it.
First thing I would do is to check if your filesystem is infected.
If Word is corrupt you usually get other types of errormessages with a pointer to where it went wrong.
“low on resources” sounds like you got something stealing a lot of memory
or hard drive space.
Check that you at least have twice as much free space on your harddrive as RAM (memory) installed.
If HD is ok, download a copy of ANTIVIR, the best free anti virus/trojan software around (my opinion), and check if your sytem is clean before you reinstall anything.
Does this happen if you open Word (via the start menu) and start a new document (File | New)? I can’t even OPEN Word without this happening.
Does the problem occur on all documents you attempt to open via double clicking or just a particular document. See above
Does the problem occur if you open Word first then use File | Open to open the offending document? See above
It initially sounds like a corrupt document but we’ll see.
Update-- I uninstalled Word, reinstalled it and it’s STILL F/U… Been using this version on the same computer for about 4 years with no problems. I also ran a spyware remover and did a full McAfee virus scan. Nada.
The error message you get is typical if you have some program that is leaking memory or a virus/trojan that consumes your resources.
But as your system was clean and Word still hangs on launch I would guess one of the following is the reason to the problem.
First thing would be if there are a number of programs that loads every time you boot stealing your resources.
But as this seem to occur only when you start Word, it might instead be your global template "normal.dot"that couses your problem.
Normal.dot contains customizations, such as styles, macros, auto corrections etc.
The error message you got is also displayed if this file is corrupt and a re-install will not help without delating this file first.