Solve : Microsoft Word 2003 nightmare?

1.	Solve : Microsoft Word 2003 nightmare?
Answer» I have never had a problem with MICROSOFT Word until now. I can use Word fine on my computer. In the past week or so, however, when I send Microsoft Word documents to people, sometimes they say they can open them and sometimes they say they can’t open them. It depends on the person. On some of my e-mail clients (I have multiple e-mail accounts), I can open the files I send myself (i.e. I will send an e-mail to my multiple e-mail accounts and I will attach Word documents to that e-mail. On some clients I can open the files I send myself, and others I can’t... I did a check disk /r (checkdisk repair) on March 9 and it fixed the problem. I could send Word documents and everyone could download them and I could send Word documents to myself and download them via AOL Mail, Yahoo, and everything. And then the problem came back again. When I click on the file in the mail client that doesn’t read the documents correctly, the attachment comes up as saying that the mail client interprets the .doc file as being related to Notepad (specifically listing Notepad as the program it wants to open the file in), not Word. Then when I try to open it (either straight from the e-mail or after downloading the file back to my hard drive), it tries to open in word and gives me the converter message. When it was working for a little while on March 9, the way I knew a Word document would work correctly even before trying to open a file is that AOL.com Mail would list it as being a Word document. Every time when I click on the attachment and see that it interprets it as a Notepad document, I know that it's not going to open: Now, as I write this (the morning of March 10), Yahoo is doing the same notepad error. Lavabit and Gmail still open it as Word and it works fine. Yahoo wasn’t doing the notepad error yesterday, even when AOL Mail was. So, what I’m saying is, up until this point, AOL Mail was the only e-mail client that seemed to be giving me (I can’t speak for other people I’ve sent the documents to) a problem; now Yahoo is giving me the problem, too. A family member bought their desktop computer together with mine at the same time from the same place, and they also have Word 2003 like I do, and never had a problem opening documents I sent them (and could open them yesterday when this was working again). When this is not working (now), this is what that family member sees when they try to open a Word document I send them. Another person gets this message when they try to open the files in Word 2007: Word experienced an error trying to open the file.Try these suggestions.Check the file permission for the document or drive.Make sure there is enough free memory and disc space.*Open the file with the text recovery converter. And on the same dialog box it has a BUTTON there for help Another person said this: I was able to open all but the one at the end of the first line (test doc.etc). They seem to be word documents, Two I had to click run program, but then it came on the screen. And yet for other people, the documents open perfectly fine, no problem. One family member, when receiving documents I send them via e-mail, notices that the files don’t have Word icons, but when they try to open the files, they open fine as Word documents. They just look weird in the e-mail itself. This did not change even during the time when it was back working yesterday. Even then, they were still seeing these non descript icons: This person until this started has never had these non descript icons appear when I would send them Word documents. They always used to look like regular Word documents in the e-mail itself. I’ve probably done like 20 System Restore operations in the last few days trying to get it back to a working point, and nothing other than that chkdsk repair worked and now it’s back to giving me problems again. I can’t reinstall office or Word because I don’t have the CD anymore. I want to be very clear that this problem has only started recently, in about the last month (or perhaps even the last few days). Previously, nobody ever reported a problem opening documents I wrote. I can't figure out what has changed just recently that is making people now have problems with documents I make. I saw this in the event viewer last night under Load Perf (which was listed in the Source column): "The performance counter name string value in the registry is incorrectly formatted. The bogus string is 2460, the bogus INDEX value is the first DWORD in Data section while the last valid index values are the second and third DWORD in Data section." and “Unloading the performance counter strings for service WmiApRpl (WmiApRpl) failed. The Error code is the first DWORD in Data section.” I don’t know what that means. Virus scan and Malwarebytes didn’t turn up any evidence of a problem relating to Word. I have created a WinZip file at http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DB3TDOGW. It has some Microsoft Word documents from my computer. March 10, 2011 was made today and so was Documents to Upload. If anybody is willing, please download this and try yourself and see if the files work. I also included a sample Excel document and PDF document, as some people reported problems opening those when I sent them to them, though they’re no longer reporting problems with Excel or PDF. Maybe if you actually see files themselves from my computer, you can figure out what’s going on. I’m not sure; I’m not an expert at computers. Everything else on my computer (Windows XP 2002) works fine. I just want it to go back to the way it was working about a month ago. I’m in Philadelphia, PA, so if anyone who reads this is in that area and wants to take a look at it, let me know. Thanks you for your most gracious time and assistance. I appreciate it very much.They all opened fine for me. Quote from: Salmon TROUT on March 10, 2011, 10:56:21 AM They all opened fine for me. Thanks for letting me know. They had normal icons, too? Thanks.I was going to take a look at the files but I can't figure out how to download from http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DB3TDOGW Quote from: soybean on March 10, 2011, 11:12:35 AM I was going to take a look at the files but I can't figure out how to download from http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DB3TDOGW Hi soybean, thanks for your reply and willingness to help me out. When you click on that link. In the bottom right corner, it will say "Please wait [number] seconds." After about 40 seconds, a link that says "Download" will appear. Click that button when it comes up, and it will download the file.Quote from: Loochery on March 10, 2011, 11:00:42 AM Thanks for letting me know. They had normal icons, too? Thanks. I opened all files on my laptop using Office 2007. They all appeared normal. The icons associated with the files were all correct, just as Salmon Trout posted.I am afraid that I think there is a hardware problem - RAM or hard drive I suspect. Follow-up: I compared the source message source (with all the HTML, etc.) of an e-mail where the Word document worked and an e-mail where the Word document didn't work? I looked through all the HTML and everything and it was pretty much all the same. The only thing that was different was that the e-mail where the document did work said Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="eleven o 9.doc" Content-Type: application/msword; name="eleven o 9.doc" and the e-mail where the document didn't work said Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="hi.doc" Content-Type: text/plain; name="hi.doc" So, the difference seems to be that in one e-mail, the file is being interpreted as application/msword, and in the other it is being interpreted as text/plain. So, if anyone knows how to make it so that it is always interpreted as application/msword, that's what I need.one solution would be to not use webmail for attaching binary file types like word documents. Some of them might have an option to at least transfer as a standard octet stream. Either way, the reason some people get different results is because some E-mail clients will use the MIME type (the Application/msword Content-Type) to determine which application to open it with; if it is application/msword, then those mail clients will either find word installed and associated with that mine type, or fallback to simply using a standard content type (notepad) if it's assigned text/plain, then those e-mail clients will default it as a notepad document. Another set of E-mail clients probably do neither, and merely download the file and execute it and let the system figure it out. (via filename associations). Thing is, when attaching, it's up to the mail client to decide what the Mime type is. Some of them recognize word documents, some don't. but either way downloading a word document as plain text will corrupt the file. Short story: This isn't a problem with word, or any copy of word on anybody's PC (except the one who doesn't get any icons at all, that might be an issue on their end) but rather with the various mail clients. Thus, the problems with other file types. I'm kind of under the same impression. I’ve noticed that when I get the notepad error, that’s only in Firefox. I can e-mail myself the exact same file via Internet Explorer and it works. Also, the first time I ever saw the phrase "octet stream" was about five minutes ago. I sent a file from Internet Explorer and it read it as a Word doc. Then a minute later I e-mailed the same file in Internet Explorer and it read it as application/octet stream (it still opened in Word). Here's a photoshopped image. I just cut the three attachments from each of the three e-mails and pasted them into the same image: Lavabit read the file the first time (When I sent it from Firefox) as a text/plain file (see the first image). Then I e-mailed the same file from Internet Explorer and it read it as a application/msword (the second image). Then I sent it again a minute later from Internet Explorer and it read it as a application/octet stream. The last two (When sent from IE), it opened in Word (both when I tried to open it from Firefox and from Internet Explorer). Why when sent from Internet Explorer would it send as a word file one minute from IE and as an application/octet steram the next minute when also sent from Internet Explorer? And what does octet stream mean? It's such a crazy coincidence that as far as I know, I read that phrase for the first time a few minutes ago and then you just happened to mention it. Thanks again for your insight. I sincerely appreciate it.Quote from: Loochery on March 10, 2011, 10:56:17 PM I’ve noticed that when I get the notepad error, that’s only in Firefox. I can e-mail myself the exact same file via Internet Explorer and it works. Here is a point of confusion; really, you are e-mailing with the web-mail interface of some service; for example, Hotmail, or AOL mail, etc. This means that when you attach a file it has to go through the browser (which may decide to upload it in some specific fashion) to the webmail interface (which may have been told by the browser that the file is something (such as text) that it isn't, depending on browser settings- for firefox you can manage the defined applications (which contribute to the various Application/ entries FF can understand) in Tools->Options, in the "Applications" area.). This on top of the fact that the webmail service may also interpret the file to try to determine if it understands the type. Obviously, the ideal circumstance is that nothing in the line understands what it is, and it is given the type Application/Octet-stream, or, something understands it and it gets the appropriate Mime type (application/msword for word, application/pdf for pdf files,etc. At some point in the line something it is recognizing the word document properly as a text file; my first guess would be firefox's "Applications" area has been corrupted or inadvertently changed during usage, and Firefox has been "told" that .doc files are all plain text documents; so it uploads them as such, and the webmail service in question thinks "oh good, the browser already knows the type, no need to investigate it myself" and gives it that same type. Of course downloading a binary file format such as a word document as a text file means that large quantities of the file will be lost and so trying to open it in word afterwards will confuse the poor thing. (thus the various dialogs, depending on the file; sometimes enough of the file remains intact for word to see that it's probably a word document, but it airs on the side of caution and tries to use the old Word 6 converter (which you, or whomever took the screenshot, didn't have installed... although it wouldn't have worked anyways.) or it falls back to the worst case scenario and assumes it's a text file that you want to import. Quote And what does octet stream mean? a stream of bytes. (a byte is 8 bytes, thus a byte is an "octet" of bits). No idea why it would show it differently, but Application/msword pretty much just means octet stream (but with a bit more info that it's a word document) anyways. Application/msword isn't a "standard" mime type, to my understanding, but Application/octet-stream is.

Answer»

I have never had a problem with MICROSOFT Word until now. I can use Word fine on my computer. In the past week or so, however, when I send Microsoft Word documents to people, sometimes they say they can open them and sometimes they say they can’t open them. It depends on the person.

On some of my e-mail clients (I have multiple e-mail accounts), I can open the files I send myself (i.e. I will send an e-mail to my multiple e-mail accounts and I will attach Word documents to that e-mail. On some clients I can open the files I send myself, and others I can’t...

I did a check disk /r (checkdisk repair) on March 9 and it fixed the problem. I could send Word documents and everyone could download them and I could send Word documents to myself and download them via AOL Mail, Yahoo, and everything. And then the problem came back again.

When I click on the file in the mail client that doesn’t read the documents correctly, the attachment comes up as saying that the mail client interprets the .doc file as being related to Notepad (specifically listing Notepad as the program it wants to open the file in), not Word. Then when I try to open it (either straight from the e-mail or after downloading the file back to my hard drive), it tries to open in word and gives me the converter message.

When it was working for a little while on March 9, the way I knew a Word document would work correctly even before trying to open a file is that AOL.com Mail would list it as being a Word document. Every time when I click on the attachment and see that it interprets it as a Notepad document, I know that it's not going to open:

Now, as I write this (the morning of March 10), Yahoo is doing the same notepad error. Lavabit and Gmail still open it as Word and it works fine. Yahoo wasn’t doing the notepad error yesterday, even when AOL Mail was. So, what I’m saying is, up until this point, AOL Mail was the only e-mail client that seemed to be giving me (I can’t speak for other people I’ve sent the documents to) a problem; now Yahoo is giving me the problem, too.

A family member bought their desktop computer together with mine at the same time from the same place, and they also have Word 2003 like I do, and never had a problem opening documents I sent them (and could open them yesterday when this was working again). When this is not working (now), this is what that family member sees when they try to open a Word document I send them.

Another person gets this message when they try to open the files in Word 2007:

Word experienced an error trying to open the file.Try these suggestions.*Check the file permission for the document or drive.*Make sure there is enough free memory and disc space.*Open the file with the text recovery converter. And on the same dialog box it has a BUTTON there for help

Another person said this:

I was able to open all but the one at the end of the first line (test doc.etc). They seem to be word documents, Two I had to click run program, but then it came on the screen.

And yet for other people, the documents open perfectly fine, no problem.

One family member, when receiving documents I send them via e-mail, notices that the files don’t have Word icons, but when they try to open the files, they open fine as Word documents. They just look weird in the e-mail itself. This did not change even during the time when it was back working yesterday. Even then, they were still seeing these non descript icons:

This person until this started has never had these non descript icons appear when I would send them Word documents. They always used to look like regular Word documents in the e-mail itself.

I’ve probably done like 20 System Restore operations in the last few days trying to get it back to a working point, and nothing other than that chkdsk repair worked and now it’s back to giving me problems again.

I can’t reinstall office or Word because I don’t have the CD anymore.

I want to be very clear that this problem has only started recently, in about the last month (or perhaps even the last few days). Previously, nobody ever reported a problem opening documents I wrote. I can't figure out what has changed just recently that is making people now have problems with documents I make.

I saw this in the event viewer last night under Load Perf (which was listed in the Source column): "The performance counter name string value in the registry is incorrectly formatted. The bogus string is 2460, the bogus INDEX value is the first DWORD in Data section while the last valid index values are the second and third DWORD in Data section."

and

“Unloading the performance counter strings for service WmiApRpl (WmiApRpl) failed. The Error code is the first DWORD in Data section.”

I don’t know what that means.

Virus scan and Malwarebytes didn’t turn up any evidence of a problem relating to Word.

I have created a WinZip file at http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DB3TDOGW. It has some Microsoft Word documents from my computer. March 10, 2011 was made today and so was Documents to Upload. If anybody is willing, please download this and try yourself and see if the files work. I also included a sample Excel document and PDF document, as some people reported problems opening those when I sent them to them, though they’re no longer reporting problems with Excel or PDF. Maybe if you actually see files themselves from my computer, you can figure out what’s going on. I’m not sure; I’m not an expert at computers.

Everything else on my computer (Windows XP 2002) works fine. I just want it to go back to the way it was working about a month ago.

I’m in Philadelphia, PA, so if anyone who reads this is in that area and wants to take a look at it, let me know.

Thanks you for your most gracious time and assistance. I appreciate it very much.They all opened fine for me.
Quote from: Salmon TROUT on March 10, 2011, 10:56:21 AM

They all opened fine for me.

Thanks for letting me know. They had normal icons, too?

Thanks.I was going to take a look at the files but I can't figure out how to download from http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DB3TDOGW Quote from: soybean on March 10, 2011, 11:12:35 AM

I was going to take a look at the files but I can't figure out how to download from http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DB3TDOGW

Hi soybean, thanks for your reply and willingness to help me out. When you click on that link. In the bottom right corner, it will say "Please wait [number] seconds." After about 40 seconds, a link that says "Download" will appear. Click that button when it comes up, and it will download the file.Quote from: Loochery on March 10, 2011, 11:00:42 AM

Thanks for letting me know. They had normal icons, too?

Thanks.

I opened all files on my laptop using Office 2007. They all appeared normal. The icons associated with the files were all correct, just as Salmon Trout posted.I am afraid that I think there is a hardware problem - RAM or hard drive I suspect.
Follow-up:

I compared the source message source (with all the HTML, etc.) of an e-mail where the Word document worked and an e-mail where the Word document didn't work? I looked through all the HTML and everything and it was pretty much all the same. The only thing that was different was that the e-mail where the document did work said

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="eleven o 9.doc"
Content-Type: application/msword; name="eleven o 9.doc"

and the e-mail where the document didn't work said

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="hi.doc"
Content-Type: text/plain; name="hi.doc"

So, the difference seems to be that in one e-mail, the file is being interpreted as application/msword, and in the other it is being interpreted as text/plain. So, if anyone knows how to make it so that it is always interpreted as application/msword, that's what I need.one solution would be to not use webmail for attaching binary file types like word documents.

Some of them might have an option to at least transfer as a standard octet stream. Either way, the reason some people get different results is because some E-mail clients will use the MIME type (the Application/msword Content-Type) to determine which application to open it with; if it is application/msword, then those mail clients will either find word installed and associated with that mine type, or fallback to simply using a standard content type (notepad) if it's assigned text/plain, then those e-mail clients will default it as a notepad document.

Another set of E-mail clients probably do neither, and merely download the file and execute it and let the system figure it out. (via filename associations). Thing is, when attaching, it's up to the mail client to decide what the Mime type is. Some of them recognize word documents, some don't. but either way downloading a word document as plain text will corrupt the file.

Short story:

This isn't a problem with word, or any copy of word on anybody's PC (except the one who doesn't get any icons at all, that might be an issue on their end) but rather with the various mail clients. Thus, the problems with other file types.

I'm kind of under the same impression.

I’ve noticed that when I get the notepad error, that’s only in Firefox. I can e-mail myself the exact same file via Internet Explorer and it works.

Also, the first time I ever saw the phrase "octet stream" was about five minutes ago. I sent a file from Internet Explorer and it read it as a Word doc. Then a minute later I e-mailed the same file in Internet Explorer and it read it as application/octet stream (it still opened in Word). Here's a photoshopped image. I just cut the three attachments from each of the three e-mails and pasted them into the same image:

Lavabit read the file the first time (When I sent it from Firefox) as a text/plain file (see the first image). Then I e-mailed the same file from Internet Explorer and it read it as a application/msword (the second image). Then I sent it again a minute later from Internet Explorer and it read it as a application/octet stream. The last two (When sent from IE), it opened in Word (both when I tried to open it from Firefox and from Internet Explorer). Why when sent from Internet Explorer would it send as a word file one minute from IE and as an application/octet steram the next minute when also sent from Internet Explorer?

And what does octet stream mean? It's such a crazy coincidence that as far as I know, I read that phrase for the first time a few minutes ago and then you just happened to mention it.

Thanks again for your insight. I sincerely appreciate it.Quote from: Loochery on March 10, 2011, 10:56:17 PM

I’ve noticed that when I get the notepad error, that’s only in Firefox. I can e-mail myself the exact same file via Internet Explorer and it works.

Here is a point of confusion; really, you are e-mailing with the web-mail interface of some service; for example, Hotmail, or AOL mail, etc. This means that when you attach a file it has to go through the browser (which may decide to upload it in some specific fashion) to the webmail interface (which may have been told by the browser that the file is something (such as text) that it isn't, depending on browser settings- for firefox you can manage the defined applications (which contribute to the various Application/ entries FF can understand) in Tools->Options, in the "Applications" area.). This on top of the fact that the webmail service may also interpret the file to try to determine if it understands the type.

Obviously, the ideal circumstance is that nothing in the line understands what it is, and it is given the type Application/Octet-stream, or, something understands it and it gets the appropriate Mime type (application/msword for word, application/pdf for pdf files,etc. At some point in the line something it is recognizing the word document properly as a text file; my first guess would be firefox's "Applications" area has been corrupted or inadvertently changed during usage, and Firefox has been "told" that .doc files are all plain text documents; so it uploads them as such, and the webmail service in question thinks "oh good, the browser already knows the type, no need to investigate it myself" and gives it that same type. Of course downloading a binary file format such as a word document as a text file means that large quantities of the file will be lost and so trying to open it in word afterwards will confuse the poor thing. (thus the various dialogs, depending on the file; sometimes enough of the file remains intact for word to see that it's probably a word document, but it airs on the side of caution and tries to use the old Word 6 converter (which you, or whomever took the screenshot, didn't have installed... although it wouldn't have worked anyways.) or it falls back to the worst case scenario and assumes it's a text file that you want to import.

Quote

And what does octet stream mean?

a stream of bytes. (a byte is 8 bytes, thus a byte is an "octet" of bits).

No idea why it would show it differently, but Application/msword pretty much just means octet stream (but with a bit more info that it's a word document) anyways. Application/msword isn't a "standard" mime type, to my understanding, but Application/octet-stream is.

Solve : Microsoft Word 2003 nightmare?

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