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Word Crashes on Document Activation

The most common scenario that causes a hard crash in Word 2000 is due to a bug in Word when calling the VBA function ConvertNumbersToText. eXtyles^® calls this function during activation to do the same thing as "Convert Auto-Numbered Headings and Lists to Plain Text" in the Cleanup dialog. We added this function call, even though it may seem redundant, because we found through testing that when you save a document to RTF and then reload it (part of the eXtyles Word-to-XML conversion), the auto-numbering in Word is not reliable (yet another bug in Word). However, due to the problems with this function in Word 2000, we set up eXtyles so that it can be turned off in the Config.ice file (in the eXtyles root directory) by adding the line:

CONVERT LIST NUMBERS TO TEXT=NO

In these cases, the Cleanup function will convert the list numbers to text, but with the possible result of unreliable list numbering due to the second Word bug.

We have also noted that this problem does not occur in Word 97, XP, or 2003. So the options for eXtyles users are:

(1) Use eXtyles as is in Word 2000, and occasionally experience a crash due to the bug in Word. When a file crashes Word during activation, you can add the line above to Config.ice and then remove it after activating the file.

(2) Turn off this function when running Word 2000 by adding the line above to Config.ice, and risk the occasional mis-numbering due to the other bug in Word. However, if you use Compare to Baseline immediately after activation, you can usually see if Word has changed the numbering on lists and then manually fix any problems resulting from this second Word bug.

(3) Switch to Word 97, XP, or 2003.

Information related to this topic can be found here.


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