Word activate/Excel format problems linked

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I have Office97 SR1 running under Win98 (not SE). I noticed the problem first with Word97–I could not activate it from the start/programs menu (or any other way). It gave a Kernel fault error box–the only thing on the desk top. Other apps seemed OK, but then I noticed that Excel would give a Kernel fault on some cell-formatting operations.

I have a work-around. If I boot the system, and as my first action try to activate Word (failure), then as my second action open a dos prompt, then as my third action try to activate Word again (success), then Word can be activated without problem until system shutdown. Important: This technique also fixes the formatting Kernel mode fault in Excel. Thus these two-apparently unrelated problems are somehow linked.

If I deviate from my “work around” in any particular, such as activating an app before Word, or such as activating two dos prompts between activations of Word–the “work around” fails. It requires the steps in exactly the order I gave them.

I’ve tried reregistering Word and Office97, but that doesn’t help. I have not reinstalled because this has the flavor of some corruption in Win98. I can’t figure out, though, which file needs to be replaced.

Anyone seen anything like this before?
Regards,
Larry Mayhew

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Nope, haven’t seen this exact behavior before. But I’ll bet it you hit ctrl-alt-del after doing a fresh restart, and let us know what’s in your task list, we’ll find something that might be causing the problem. Like findfast or some other intrusive program.

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Thanks for the reply. I usually get nothing back when I ask about this problem. Here’s the list of apps running after a fresh restart, but I run a pretty “lean” system:
Explorer
Mswheel
Rexproxy
Systray
Rnaapp

That’s it. You may wonder why Rexproxy and Rnaapp are running before I’ve done anything. I have some app (probably a Microsoft app) that tries to connect somewhere via my dialup connection and during startup I always cancel the pop-up dialog that asks to connect. My suspicion is that the app is trying to register itself even though it’s already registered. But here are the important points:

1. None of this involves the office97 suite.

2. This startup activity had occurred for months before the problem we’re discussing–so I don’t believe the two are related.

Regards,
Larry Mayhew

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Okay, let’s see what we can do.

First, hit start-run and type msconfig and hit enter. Go to the startup tab and uncheck everything in there except your virus checker–if you’re using one. Are you? Which one? Why isn’t it in the list?

After that, (just deal with not being able to use the mouse for awhile please) and see if you still experience the Office apps issue. If so, with no programs open, type the following two commands in the Start-Run:

winword.exe /regserver
excel.exe /regserver

(If it says it can’t find the files, then find the path to them and include the path with the command line. These commands may or may not run the programs; if not, run the program yourself.)

Let me know how that goes, k?

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Here are the answers:

1. I don’t run a virus scanner on my home machine. I’m not a newbie, am careful, have never had an infection and don’t like to deal with the issues created by such scanners. Occasionaly I run a dos-based scanner (FPROT). When this Word problem first hit, I did install a trial copy of McAfee but it found nothing.

2. I don’t understand the mouse comment. Only the mouse wheel functionality is disabled by your procedure. The mouse is detected by the bios and the Windows driver works fine.

3. After unchecking everything in Startup, a clean boot shows only Explorer and Rnaapp running. The “popup” attempt to connect to my ISP still occurs but I’ve already commented about that.

4. The Word problem still exists after using msconfig and rebooting.

5. Winword and excel /regserver both run from the start menu. They apparently execute without error, but they show me nothing (i.e., no output). The problem remains after
running both commands and still remains after restarting the system.

Here are the details I get with the error message from Word:

WINWORD caused an invalid page fault in
module KERNEL32.DLL at 0177:bff7d52b.
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=0177 EIP=bff7d52b EFLGS=00010287
EBX=81e93f70 SS=017f ESP=0062e2e4 EBP=0062e2f8
ECX=8326919a DS=017f ESI=00000000 FS=0fcf
EDX=81e90030 ES=017f EDI=0062e720 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
0f b7 34 71 88 55 fc c0 6d fc 04 0f b6 5d fc 03
Stack dump:
81ebe766 000004e9 81e93f70 0062e820 830f3000 0062e32c bff7d0a1 81e93f70 81ebe766 81ebe770 0062e720 00000100 00000000 81e93f18 81ebe6d4 00000001

Regards,
Larry Mayhew

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