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Doug VanFlag for Canada

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Word / Excel 2007 lockup in Windows 8.1

Hello all,

My father in law just updated from Windows 8 to 8.1 and immediately noticed that both Word and Excel 2007 no longer function. Since he uses Office Word 2007 every day, the problem seems like it is attributed to the OS update.

What happens is that both programs immediately freeze up after loading... meaning, Word or Excel open to a blank document and the mouse cannot activate any of the menus, cannot type into the blank document. Looking at the programs in the task manager (Cntr-Shft-Esc), they appear to be working, no sign of lockup, no hording of CPU cycles but switching back to either program, still they appear frozen.

What I have tried (none of these changes helped individually or combined):

- Changing properties to Run this program as an administrator: NO! For some reason, Admin mode is grayed-out. I don't understand why? I have never seen this before. But may not be related to the problem.
- File Permissions: For some reason the USER permissions were only read/write. So I tested by changing them to full.
- Changed Compatibility mode: Run this program in compatibility mode for … and selected Windows 7.
- Safe Mode: I tried running both Word and Excel in safe mode. Still locked up.
- Office repair mode: was tried, completed, but no change.
- Looked for OS and/or Office updates: Some Windows 8.1 updates, completed, no change.
- Reboot computer: many times.
- Reinstalled Office: yes.

Any other ideas?
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Thanks for all the advice!

I should clarify a few additional facts. The owner of this computer is just a home user, he purchased Office with his computer (Windows 8 and Office 2007). So, upgrading Office is out of the question (besides, Microsoft's official site states that it is compatible). Since this is just a simple home computer, there are no networks... rather just a single computer with a USB attached printer.

>Before doing anything, uninstall Office, restart and then try to run something as Admin.
>Try running cmd.exe with Run as Administrator.  


About the grayed out Run as Administrator - I think that issue is only associated with the Office products. Any other reason why this option is grayed-out? I am quite certain that the account has full admin rights because I was able to access netplwiz and set the login to automatic (no password screen).

Otherwise, I don't believe this is a question of a corrupted OS because everything else functions perfectly, AFAIK.

>Lastly the first thing office does on startup is look at network drives or look at printers. if it is hanging on startup and
>its ALL office applications (and possibly IE)


I should also point out that Outlook (he uses every day) and IE are both unaffected. Still, removing the printer is 'something' to try.

>Please logon as a different user, does that make a difference?

That advice is also worth trying.

Thanks all. I'll try a remote session tomorrow evening. Hopefully, with more success. My, very reluctant alternative, is possibly installing Open Office... he doesn't like change, so I would rather not go down that road.


Personal opinion: If Windows 8.1 is a completely different OS compared to 8.0 than Microsoft broke the standard versioning conventions! I would expect that a 0.1 update would be a minor update! Fortunately, I wasn't involved in the decision to upgrade Windows to 8.1. :-]
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The other option is corrupted user
Account. Create a new user account. Log in and see if it has the same issue? You can always move desktop icons or files.

This would be a good test
Hello all,

Sorry for the slow update. I appreciate everyone's efforts to help solve this problem.

I was quite confident that this wasn't related to any sort of Windows 8.1 corruption...considering that all other software was working, as intended. Remember, only Excel and Word appeared affected by that Windows 8.1 update.

Most of the suggestions made were far too involved to do over a remote connection so I opted for the simplest solution, that is, update Office. :)  

After removing the old Office suite, I installed Office Pro 2010 (got a good deal on it - $100 for a full/unopened copy)

Thanks all!
Ty
Thank you for the update and I was happy to help.
Glad to help sconnell :)
happy things are working ok for you.