Hi,
I have Office 2003 and a couple of days ago, I began not being able to open Word (Excel is fine). I've had to use it in Safe Mode. When I try to open it, a dialogue box says "MS Word has stopped working" Next box says "Windows will close Word and notify you if a solution is found". I go through that each time I need to use Word and then each time I retry and am able to open in Safe Mode. Help!
Julie C.

See Troubleshoot problems that occur when you start or use Word 2010, 2007, or 2003.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Hi Julie

I had much the same Office 2003 problem as you describe (except Word would not open even in Safe mode, and in my case it did also affect Excel - which then did open in Safe mode).

I got the same "MS Word has stopped working" and "Windows will close Word and notify you if a solution is found" messages.

I tried finding an explanation using Google, which led me to your query but not to any solutions.

Word had been fine up until the last time I used it a few days ago, so I thought about what had happened since then. Seemed like the big event had been last week's Internet Explorer scare. Apart from stopping any use of Explorer, I also downloaded and activated Microsoft's initial better-than-nothing recommendation called EMET 3.0.

I won't try to explain what EMET does (as if I could) - if it does not ring a bell in your case then my solution is not going to be the same as you need.

Anyway, this EMET thing needed configuring, and given a choice among the Custom Settings of "Recommended Settings" or "Maximum Security Settings" I naturally chose Maximum Security.

And everything was fine until I needed to use Word earlier today and it would not open.

So, just to be trying something, I went back into EMET and changed those Custom Settings to "Recommended".

And Word opened just fine after that. No more problems.

Now, I am not remotely an expert and don't really have a clue what was going on (yeah, it just seemed a good idea to run strange software because Microsoft told me to). But on the off chance that your computer was similarly treated to a dose of Maximum Security strength EMET, you may find that reconfiguring it to "Recommended Settings" restores Word to normal operation.

Thanks for your reply. I'm going to research EMET before I download it! Julie

Oops.

Sorry, Julie, I didn't mean that you should now download EMET in order to solve your problem.

My "solution" would only apply to you if you happened to have installed EMET before the problem with Word not opening arose. (Kind of why I said if EMET didn't ring a bell then it would not be the solution you need.)

Sorry that I didn't spell that out clearly enough - it was past midnight here and I was probably a bit tired. As a novice, I would not normally have dared to offer advice, but it did seem that we had experienced essentially the same problem and that was the way I fixed it in my case. (The only other thing I had tried was switching off and re-starting my computer - obviously - and that did not fix Word.)

Cheers

gnall