Hi
I am having a major problem with a large number of Word docs which have been copied to my file server. The docs are in Microsoft Word 97 – 2003 format and open fine with Office 2007. I recently rolled out Office 2013 to a department. When they try and open these docs by double clicking the file, the Word splash screen with status "Starting..." opens with animated dots but stays in this state. I have left this for over 10 minutes but it doesn’t open. I end up having to close the splash screen using the top right corner cross but if I check in task manager the task remains eating up 25-30% of the CPU - I have to kill the task from here. I have tested this locally and in RDS where majority of users work from hosted office sessions and the problem is evident in both. The major problem is that RDS server CPU can reach 100% if a couple of users run into the problem.
Going back to the issue. If I open up a blank instance of Word 2013 first and go File - Open and browse to the file, if I choose “Open and Repair” the file opens with “Errors detected”:
"Drawn Objects and Text Boxes 1"
If I select "go to" it goes to the Footer/headers - There is nothing in the header/footer that looks like it is causing an issue. If I now save the file either as 2003 or docx and close, the next time I try and open (double click) the file opens in compatibility mode or normal mode no problem. It seems strange Word is not able to automatically open/detect and repair anything it doesn’t like.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can work around this?
Thanks