Wordpad and Word crash instantly

[Mike521]

Hey all, need help big time..

For the longest time, wordpad and MS word (all versions -- 97, xp, and 2003) crash almost instantly after startup. If I start typing quickly, the crash holds off until I stop typing. I have no idea why it happens, the only message I get is the generic "encountered an error and must quit" etc..

I'm thinking perhaps there is a service or something that word relies on to run, that I have disabled.. but I looked through the list and there's only a couple things disabled and I don't think they're related anyway..

if someone has encountered this before and figured out how to fix it, that'd be awesome!

 

[3xp0]

May be reinstall?

 

[Apokalipse]

not trying to attack you, but he said he tried many versions, which would have had to be installed seperately

 

[3xp0]

Sorry I didn't notice.

Actually, I think such problem may occur when some DLLs are missing. Did you remove any library windows files somehow lately?

 

[Apokalipse]

it should give you the name of a corrupt dll file in the error message
i had this one on boot once:
"C:\Windows\System32\hal.dll is corrupt, please attempt to repair or replace this file"
maybe not these exact words

 

[Mike521]

Thanks for the replies guys --

I haven't gotten a corrupt file message, nor did I remove any dll's.. here's some additional info:

to my surprise, it ran perfectly in safe mode (I thought I'd tried that months ago with no success).

Here's the report I see when I go to event viewer\Application:

The source is Microsoft Office, no Category, and event is 1000

Faulting application winword.exe, version 11.0.6113.0, stamp 40077019, faulting module hpzntp04.dll, version 2.80.0.0, stamp 3ba7d3f7, debug? 0, fault address 0x0001fdc3.

There are dozens of these, all are identical. Then there's one where the source is "Application Error":

Faulting application wordpad.exe, version 5.1.2600.1106, faulting module hpzntp04.dll, version 2.80.0.0, fault address 0x0001fdc3.

Then there's some hex numbers, etc..

I don't think I have anything particularly conflict prone running. Mcafee virusscan, zone alarm firewall, and nvidia motherboard and video card drivers / software..

I suppose the next step is to start up in normal mode, and one by one, kill all running user processes, then kill system processes, till I find the one that's conflicting with word, right? Any better way to narrow it down?

Thanks so much for the help

 

[NYY DYNASTY]

i've seen this problem before with MS Word. I've deleted the file NORMAL.DOT and it has run fine after that....that file can cause word to stop responding or shutdown on its own...

search for that file and if you have it, remove it (or rename it to something else, like NORMAL.OLD)

 

[Mike521]

tried that, didn't do anything for me

Someone else has pointed out that the hp module is for hp printers, so I'm troubleshooting that possibility right now, I think it might be that!

I connect to my printer through a router and through a Win98 machine that is sharing the printer, so perhaps if that machine is off when I run word, that causes the fault. If so I'll try to unset that printer as the default.

 

[3xp0]

replace hpzntp04.dll with someone elses computer, who has a working Word version =)

 

[icemanx]

Actually had this happen at work the other day

the file " hpzntp04.dll " - all we did was DELETE it and have the persons machine reinstall the printer software as that dll file was corrupt and needs to see a printer attached first

it now works here so I know what happened..