Office 97 slow to close documents

[time]

The afflicted PC is a P350 with 192MB RAM running Windows 98. MS Word starts normally and loads documents quickly. However, it can take a staggering 45 seconds or so to close them, even unmodified.

The documents are not large; the problem occurs with half a page.

According to System Monitor, there's still about 64MB physical RAM free.

I disabled the anti-virus and firewall software, to no effect.

I started in Safe Mode and observed exactly the same problem.

All I can come up with is that Office is corrupt, but I don't know whether reinstalling it is likely to fix it (it leaves an awful lot behind when you uninstall it).

 

[Buck]

How big is the pagefile? How fragmented is the partition?

 

[time]

He defrags regularly.

I just checked stats with a document loaded after a reboot. Free RAM was above 80MB and the pagefile was about 60MB.

 

[Cliptin]

What version of Word?

 

[Mercutio]

Does he have any macros set up? Any at all?

 

[blakerwry]

when does the lag occur? on a "File -> save" or a "File -> save as" or both?

 

[Jake the Dog]

does he have any file encryption or compression running uilities?

 

[time]

What version of Word?

See thread title.

Does he have any macros set up? Any at all?

Not that I'm aware of. I can suppress that by renaming his Normal.dot file, can't I?

when does the lag occur? on a "File -> save" or a "File -> save as" or both?

Neither. It occurs when trying to close an unmodified document.

does he have any file encryption or compression running uilities?

No.

I've since discovered that closing Word without first closing the document window appears to work, but in fact Word is still running in the background ("not responding"). Double-clicking on a second document at this point virtually freezes the PC. This can be cleared by killing the first instance of Word, after which the second document loads successfully in a new copy of Word.

 

[Buck]

So, Word isn't closing properly (not responding). Have you run Scandisk?

 

[time]

So, Word isn't closing properly (not responding).

ONLY if you don't close the document window first. :-?

Have you run Scandisk?

Yes.

 

[Buck]

Is there a lot of disk activity when using, opening, or closing Word?

 

[time]

None that I can see.

 

[Buck]

Any problems noted in Device Manager? How long has this problem persisted? What events happened when this problem began?

 

[time]

Device Manager seems okay.

It's hard to know when this problem started. It appears to have become much worse in the last two days. I thought I first observed a delay closing documents a couple of months ago, but it didn't seem that bad. At that stage the PC's owner was talking about replacing it, so I didn't pursue it - and in any case I couldn't find any info to explain it.

I fitted extra RAM a few weeks ago because the owner was keen and I thought there was an outside chance it might help.

We could be looking at a systemic problem here - it's now lost Active Desktop (offhand I can't remember how to fix that with W98), and Excel seems flaky as well (although not exactly the same behaviour).

 

[mubs]

I was once asked to solve a similar problem; Win 98 + Office97. Word would take ~8 minutes to print each page (text only, single font Times New Roman, plain vanilla two page letter). No matter what I did, I couldn't fix it. Searching M$ and the Web didn't help.

Finally I uninstalled Office, backed up the Registry, and spent an hour or so methodically looking for and deleting Registry keys that might pertain to Office. After this, reinstalling Office97 fixed the problem. Have no idea what the problem really was.

I'm sorry I can't offer more concrete help.

 

[Buck]

That is still a decent suggestion mubs. I would also run a virus check.

 

[Mercutio]

I'll check with the MOUS masters I work with. They've got to be good for something besides knowing how to do pivot tables and mail merges.

 

[Tea]

It's a known bug, Time. I've met it before. Word had always had problems with file saves, going right back to the earliest Windows versions. I guess there would have been a dozen or maybe 20 instances of it that we have met or been called about over the years. It's nearly always Word 97. Word 95 used to do it quite a bit too - probably more than 97 - and Word 6.0 as well. Come to think of it, maybe 6.0 was the worst - I can't remember anymore.

I think that all you have to do is uninstall Word completely, using the M$ provided method (run setup off CD and select "uninstall"), reboot and reinstall. Then it goes away and usually doesn't come back for months or sometimes years.

But my memory may be playing me false (I was a very young little ape at the time) and maybe you had to do a bit more than that. Hope you don't have to use the Mubs solution!

Mostly Matt & Warren (Tannin's techies back before he got sensible and decided to have a life) used to deal with it, so I'm hazy on the details. (I don't think I was actually invented at the time.)

 

[jtr1962]

I'm not sure if it would have anything to do with this particular problem, but did you remove FindFast and a couple of other TSRs that install along with M$Office? The first time I installed M$Office on a machine I noticed that there would inexplicably be drive activity every few minutes, even when I was doing nothing. Eventually, I traced the problem to FindFast and removed it, along with whatever other garbage M$Office insisted on running in the background. It made everything more stable, and so far I've never experienced the types of problems with Word that you have, although the version of Excel that comes with Office97 asks me if I want to save a spreadsheet whenever I close it, even if I made no changes.

I don't know why M$, and many vomit box builders, like to have so much useless junk running in the background. It hogs RAM and invariably makes the system less stable.

 

[jtr1962]

BTW, I like your new avatar, Tea. You didn't accidentally stick your finger in an outlet, did you?

 

[Tea]

Nope. I juzt popped around to Groltz'z place to take a look at his Athlon, and his cooling fanz blow a little ztronger than I'm uzed to. Like a hurricane, actually. Think of it az a zort of an instant bad fur day.

Az for FaztFuzkUp, I couldn't agree more. I don't think we need to wonder if a gentleman of Time'z experience and nouz haz removed FaztFuzkUp or not. :wink:

 

[time]

FaztFuzkUp is the spawn of the devil. I hate anything running that doesn't need to be, which makes me incompatible with modern software philosophy. :evil:

There's nothing running that shouldn't be there - as it is I begrudge the resident antivirus software, but I concede that hapless Outlook Express users need all the protection they can get ...

In any case, as I reported, the symptoms are still present in SafeMode - and there ain't nuthin running in SafeMode except oderous Office and widiculous Windows.

BTW, I don't have the accursed machine here; hence the protracted delays between my responses.

Thanks for the reassurance about uninstall/reinstall, Tea. I confess I envisaged a scenario like Mubs described. :eekers:

 

[Cliptin]

Instead of hunting and deleting try MS's Eraser97.

Otherwise help links:
An Overview of Microsoft Office 97 SR-2 -
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q192/8/74.ASP?LNG=ENG&SA=ALLKB
Can't Remove Office Application Using Office Setup -
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q117/6/36.asp?LNG=ENG&SA=ALLKB
How to Determine Whether SR-2 Is Installed -
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q249/9/74.ASP?LNG=ENG&SA=ALLKB
How to Completely Remove the SR-1 Patch and Patch Update -
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q173/4/31.ASP?LNG=ENG&SA=ALLKB

 

[Will Rickards WT]

First try:
renaming normal.dot, word will recreate a fresh one for you.

Second try:
goto Tools -> Templates and Add-Ins
check if there are any global templates running.
if there are, note them, close word, find them, rename them, and rename normal.dot again.

Last resort: uninstall office, run eraser for the version of office you have (which you get from ms), then reinstall.

Maybe http://www.mvps.org/word will have some insight