I've been fighting with this for a few days.

I've got Win2k+SP4 + the latest fixes. Office97+SP2b is installed on my T41 laptop.

WordPerfect Office X3 is also installed. I made the mistake of installing all the X3 fonts - some 1100 of them. When these crashes started, I thought better of it and removed them.

Sometime recently, maybe after the most recent Windows Update, maybe after installing the latest ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 driver, Excel and Word have started crashing whenever I attempt to change the font or the attributes (e.g. Bold) of text I enter. Existing documents that have other fonts or bold, italic, etc., work fine. PPT doesn't crash.

I'm usually running at 1400x1050x32bits. 1024x768 and even VGA make no difference in the crashing. I tried running it in Windows SafeMode, but it crashes with a kernel error on trying to boot SafeMode. :-/

As soon as I hit the B button in Excel, it closes with a popup saying Windows is closing Excel and a log is being created. A binary file is dumped in c:\\Documents and Settings\\Me\\Local Settings\\Temp\\ , but nothing is jumpings out at me as a cause. The same crash happens if I touch the Font drop-down box.

My guess is that something is corrupted in the Registry regarding the Fonts, or a font is corrupted, or something. But I've been unable to find the problem. X3 works OK - it doesn't crash on changing the fonts - but it has other issues....

I've reinstalled Office97 and SP2b. I've reinstalled X3. I've compared the fonts in c:\\WinNT\\Fonts with systems that don't crash. No difference. I bought a copy of [link|http://www.pctools.com/registry-mechanic/|Registry Mechanic]. It's a nice product and seemed to work fine (finding 200+ errors and correcting them), but it didn't solve the problem. I installed Norton Systemworks 2001 (just NU, not NAV). It found a few more things, but those didn't solve the problem either.

Nothing jumps out at me at MS's KnowledgeBase either.

Any ideas? Thanks a bunch.

Cheers,
Scott.

I also downloaded [link|http://www.proximasoftware.com/fontexpert/|Font Expert 2005] ($49.00?!?) and had it look at things. It didn't find any problems with the fonts themselves, but said some of the mappings weren't quite right.

TweakUI -> Repair -> Repair Font Folder and rebooting didn't change anything.

I guess it's not the Fonts then, but some other problem.

I looked at getting the latest ATI driver, but it wants .Net 1.1. (Luckily, that's already installed, but I'm not sure I want to go that route at this point.) Also, the T41 seems to be running an IBM-customized version (ati2mtag.sys 6.14.10.6525), but I can't find the file that has the IBM name tacked on in the version at the moment. I don't see any way to revert to the previous version, but I'll see if I can do that...

Hmm 21 hits on [link|http://groups.google.com/groups?q=6.14.10.6525&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=N&tab=wg|6.14.10.6525]. Most of them seem to be related to games, but I know Office can bring out bugs in display drivers...

One of the threads mentions finding a problem by using [link|http://www.kensalter.com/fsautostart/|FSAutoStart] - apparently another utility was causing the problem in his case.

This evening I'll try a different driver (there are some [link|http://groups.google.com/group/nz.comp/browse_thread/thread/7d5af7669c411e82/20a607f96d8e3a60?lnk=st&q=6.14.10.6525&rnum=1#20a607f96d8e3a60|reports] (last post) that Catalyst 5.4 (6.14.10.6525) has problems that earlier versions don't and that 5.1 may be one to try). Since I don't run games, and since it just started happening recently, it sounds like a reasonable approach.

I'll report back when I know more. Thanks again.

Cheers,
Scott.