SteveOH

Word 2007 will not start up.  It just won’t.  All I see is the splash screen for 5 seconds, and then a silent crash (no error message).  The error log shows an Event ID 7003, session terminated unexpectedly, and some other helpful messages.

So I combed the internet, spent much more time than I should have troubleshooting, and I finally found what the issue was.

Here’s what the deal is.  Apparently Word scans the default printer of the system and loads printer settings, which allows it to set up the WYSIWYG editing and printing capability.  Which is great, however, if the page configuration of the printer (and other settings of course) don’t jive with it, it will fail (in my particular case, the CPU would stay at around 30% (on a dual core, which is significant) and the memory utilization of winword.exe would increase rapidly from 8000 kb to 230,000 kb, at which point it crashed silently (or graciously as some might say).  The issue is the default printer.  If you have a printer that you must print to (and therefore, cannot simply delete), set the Adobe PDF printer as the default and see how nice it is to have Word 2007 startup correctly.

This is a bug, without question.  If a program simply doesn’t functional as defined, for whatever reason, and the application is not prepared for the situation, it is a unforseen / unplanned error and therefore constitutes a bug.   Hopefully they’ll fix it, because the 20 hours I spent troubleshooting this are gone forever.