WORD to 100%

I have a file with song lyrics, about 120 pages, 284K characters, file size under 1MB.

When I start Word, [10,324MB application file size] nothing is too bad; it takes up about 1.3MB minimized, 10MB as the active application. When another application is active, Winword.exe uses 70%-85%, though it is sitting there doing nothing.

I can open a .txt version of the data file & memory goes to about 10MB, and CPU time is at most 5%.

If I open a .doc version (originally it was .doc, but when I saw this problem I converted it to .txt to eliminate any possible macro virus & checked the contents) created by changing the .txt to .doc again, the memory used goes to 25MB, and CPU time jumps to at least 85%, & mostly 100%.

Scrolling through the file causes the % to DROP [opposite of scrolling any other file], then goes back up - and selection of any menu item causes it to drop too.

More strange - I just changed the font from Times New Roman to plain text. CPU% went from a solid 100% to varying between 50%-85%, then I 'undid' the action & % went back to 100%.

Now I doubt this was happening last month - I saw nothing to point me to the CPU getting tied up. Noticed it today when I could not get control when loading a web page.

I have tried a re-load of Word from the CD, even destroying the Winword.exe file so I know it was re-created (a problem a few weeks ago proved that requesting a repair install with over-write 'no matter what' does not over write all files -- see XP Theme gone in this catagory).

I plan to un-install all of Office, then defrag & re-install, but want to hear from others about possible causes first.

Running AMD Sempron 2300+ (1.53GHz) single processor, 512 MB DDRram, Performance Options set to 'Programs' for both Processor & Memory, 4000MB virtual memory spread across drive 0 (0 on C:, 2GB on

) and 2GB on drive 1 (0 on G, 2Gb on H, 0 on I), available is 90GB.

At this point, I suspect something wrond with the hard drive [stay away from Maxtor 6B200P0, 200GB units]as a recent chkdsk seems to have caused the XP theme, & other, problems. DARN this MS

OS!!!!!

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Webmaster

Try turning of spelling and grammar checking if you have that on, and see if that causes the high CPU.

drpower555

My first thought for your XP problem was services. Now I'm wondering that again. I'm sure someone will disagree, but I had a similar problem with Access and it turned out to be a service that I had disabled. I forget which one it was, as it was awhile ago.

TheShadow

thats a possibilty, several of MS new services are CPU hogs. The new ad ware tool uses as much CPU time as the desktop 90% or so and seems to turn on when Office files that have macros are involved. MsMpEng.exe is a nasty little guy that starts lots of disk activity and does no share well running as a relativly high priority. I am debating whether to purge that turkey.

crabeater

Thanks for the suggestions -
I turned off all spell / grammer check --- no change
I don't see that 'nasty' MsMpEng.exe in processes
I don't see any relevent stopped services. Just things that keep others out, like RAS.

Since the plain text version was otherwise identical in all options, I don't see why using Times New Roman should do this. (I also have added / removed the 2 column setting, but no change.)

Also, since I 'dumbed down' the file to plain text then 'upped' it again to nicer appearance, and I see no macros in any case, I don't understand all the problems that this is causing.

I also am wondering why the file size to so large - after going to .txt the file is ~340K; change that to .rtf ~600K, change that to .doc 997K; And the file I 'dumbed down' from .doc to .txt was ~943K even though it would have had all of the tracked changes (as seen when you open a .doc file using notepad, any changes are at the end of the document, but Word inserts them in the proper place). Just did that to the .rtf & .doc and both have a lot of stuff inserted - will TRY to look though it all for causes. Since the .doc uses Normal.dot I may try having that re-written.

It is NOT just going to .doc because I have a version that does not increase the % - only after I add the font

so I am going to try narrowing down WHICH PAGE or pages causes the % to skyrocket (I just changed 66 of 248 un-formatted pages & it went from near 0% to 99% !!!)

I will wait a little longer, for more suggestions, but in a couple days I will un-install Office to see if that fixes things.

Cessation

Ya know... I once worked on an outlook problem for about 30 min till I just couldnt take it anymore.
My boss took 5 minutes and reinstalled the application and everything worked great.

I suggest the same.
GL

Cess

Danman32

I love it how clients call me with a server or better yet, a PC that won't boot, might go into safe mode, might not.

After doing some checks, I determine it might be better to reinstall. They don't want to do that. Well, we could spend several hours trying to figure out what went wrong and try to fix it, or we can take only one or two hours in reinstall and restore, and have a cleaner system to boot.

crabeater

I prefer to KNOW what is wrong & what fixes it ---- but this IS MS

and between that & this hard drive, it may take a $400/hr analyst to figure it all out, so I WILL clean it all out & re-install

At least I will have the data files - they should be safe, but also were saved last week to another PC

Cessation

i win =P

drpower555

Micra Sof tends to take a Mega ****. That is why I INSIST on a seperate DATA partition, or better yet a seperate DATA drive. It just makes it to easy to redo the SYS volume. A word to the wise never, I say again NEVER let the OS handle your data.

strauchr

Just curious if you have tried opening the file on another computer. Or try copying the text into another word document and try using that. It could be some sort of corruption in the file.

Another thing to try would be opening a document of similar size on that PC and see what happens.

strauchr

Danman32 wrote:

I love it how clients call me with a server or better yet, a PC that won't boot, might go into safe mode, might not.

After doing some checks, I determine it might be better to reinstall. They don't want to do that. Well, we could spend several hours trying to figure out what went wrong and try to fix it, or we can take only one or two hours in reinstall and restore, and have a cleaner system to boot.

I'd rather work out the problem so if I see it again I can fix it in minutes rather than having to trash a PC all over again.

Remeber that fixing faults builds your knowledge base

crabeater

How many times do you have to uninstall a MS product before it is completely uninstalled??? INFINITE #

After Each install, I checked the file's status:

1. First tried a "repair" install of ALL of Office.
2. Then I uninstalled & checked - Office executables were still in Program Files

, so I deleted them all. Re-install - same problem
3. Uninstalled again. Looked all through the C: drive & deleted anything that seemed associated with Office.
4. De-fragged the drive TWICE to eliminate any files it said could not be de-fragged the first run through.
5. Deleted the file that was causing all the problems, leaving only the .rtf and .txt versions.
6. Re-installed Office - even the .rtf will cause 99% CPU time for Word.

I installed another system weeks ago - will try the original .doc that was saved there, in that PC & then on this one.

Cessation - cease & desist the party you are throwing yourself

because it ain't fixed yet!!

Danman32

Have you tried renaming all instances of normal.dot? Sometimes that gets corrupted, though I haven't heard issues with that in several years.

crabeater

I did not rename them - I deleted them so Office would have to put them back.

I now have my other system turned on - XP SP2 from a training book, with Office installed a couple weeks ago, and the files are from that old or more, plus a newer copy of the.doc

The 'other' CPU is PII/266 320MB ram 480MB virtual memory.

When I open the problem file, or a similar sized file, and though the computer runs about 15% of this newer PC, the Processor time varies - about 90%-97%, and I can jump around & open other programs without delays.

So my personal feeling is that the .doc file should not tie up an AMD 2300 more than 50% if I am not doing some action [like in the process of changing fonts]. Also I don't think that the amount of memory used should jump to 28MB or sometimes 35MB, while the slower PC uses about 21MB.

I am about to simply use this file as .txt but still think it is worth finding out what is wrong so this can be fixed for me & others.

TheShadow

I still suspect that your problem is related to a corrupted normal.dot. Unfortunately it is part an parcel of anything that used the word engine including MS Outlook and maybe Onenote and VB for Apps extensions. So when you say that you uninstalled all of office did that mean that you uninstalled all Microsoft software that you can make a document in? After that you have to start looking at a corrupt font. Microsoft always uses "do as I say and not as I do" programming specs. You never get all of MS sofware uninstalled and the registry is always left in a mess.

crabeater

Not sure how I could still have a bad Normal.dot since I did a search of the entire drive & deleted them. If the problem didn't just start I could see that the CD had a bad copy, but I didn't have a 100% problem, slowing the PC to a virtual crawl, a month ago.

I uninstalled ALL of Office - not just Word, but Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint - everything. And since it didn't actually remove the executables, I removed them manually. I searched through the "Documents and Settings" folders and deleted dozens of things that could have been related-to-Office files.

As I have said, I have tried to be very thorough since I know that MS does not function well, as shown that they don't even always get rid of their own 'pointer' files [any ~name.ext when you open a document - saw a few dozen of them stop a user from saving any changes to a file].

Your mention of 'corrupt font' gives me a new task - I will go into the Windows/Fonts folder & copy from another sourct into that folder. I have long mentioned that using Times New Roman sets the 100% off, but forgot that the fonts are part of the OS, not Office.

Now I will see what that does. IF the system will let me - just tried & got 'protected' message.

EDIT - I expanded the fonts for Times New Roman from my \i386 folder, and placed them in the Fonts folder. Still have 100% or near it. But I am convinced that the problem is in the OS and that I will have to re-load XP over itself, at the very least. AAARRRRRGGGGGGGGG!!!!!

I have seen some documents that are corrupt ["you need a converter to open that document" comes up for several other .doc files] so I'm sure that the problem is in the OS [gee, thanks Bill, and Maxtor for the drive

] and either the drive's surface, or MS, or both, is the fault.

TheShadow

This is really a tough one. Continued luck