MacOS – Following Mavericks upgrade, Microsoft Word closes silently right after opening

crashmacosms office

After the Mavericks upgrade, I'm seeing Microsoft Word close silently, no error message, about a second after opening. If I open a .docx file directly, the file displays during that one second, so it does seem to start up at least.

Following this tip on answers.microsoft.com, I disabled Microsoft Error Reporting.app, after which the Apple Crash Reporter opens when Word closes. So I guess there are two problems: Word crashes silently, and Microsoft Error Reporting (presumably set up to open instead of Apple Crash Reporter, for Microsoft apps, when enabled) crashes silently.

I used Word without problems shortly before upgrading, so this seems likely to be related to Mavericks.

This is Office:mac 2011, and Word version is 14.3.8.

PowerPoint and Excel open without problems.

This is not all that googleable — am I alone in this? Has somebody found a workaround?

Update:

  • Logging in as a guest on the same machine and opening Word, it doesn't crash. So this is probably triggered by something in my user profile.

  • The Apple Crash Report shows the main thread as having crashed on a SIGSEGV:

Crashed Thread:  0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00000000bff45000

VM Regions Near 0xbff45000:
    Stack                  00000000bf745000-00000000bff45000 [ 8192K] rw-/rwx SM=COW  
--> 
    CG shared images       00000000c0003000-00000000c000b000 [   32K] r--/r-- SM=SHM  

Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0   y         0x012a1073 wdGetApplicationObject + 8790819
1   y         0x00790079 wdCommandDispatch + 1425369
2   ???       0x89fffffe 0 + 2315255806

Best Answer

I have several Machines which run MS Office 2011 perfectly fine with Mavericks. I would suspect some corrupt settings or cache is the reason for your problem. Try the following:

  1. try moving the Folder "~/Documents/Microsoft-User Data" somewhere else (f.e. the Desktop) and try starting Word
  2. try moving the folder "~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office" somewhere else (f.e. the Desktop) and try starting Word

In both cases the Folder will be recreated with default settings, so if Word starts without problem again you know the source of your problems. If not you can delete the newly created folders and replace them with your previous one.

Please try that and post some feedback.

Update by asker: removing the above folders didn't help ... but removing ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.microsoft.Word.savedState did.

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