Word – Cropped Word 2010 equations

The short answer is that Office 2008 for Mac is a weak imitation of Office for Windows.

Options:

• Run a Windows virtual machine on your mac. Use software like VMWare Fusion, Parallels or VirtualBox to create the virtual machine. Install Word for Windows on the virtual machine. You will need to pay for licenses for Windows and Office (on top of what you've already paid for Office for Mac)
• Try OpenOffice or other alternatives to Word and see which will play nicely with Word's equations.
• Wait until later in 2010 for the release of Office for Mac 2011. Hope that it plays better with Word for Windows.

None of these is a simple solution.

The virtual machine solution is the most likely to just work after you get it set up, but setting it up will take some time. The OpenOffice solution is quick (and free) to try, but may have some compatibility issues opening and re-saving documents. The Mac team at Microsoft has lots of great things to say on their blog about the next release of Office, but I'll believe it when I see it.

It could be possible that this file is broken. First identify, which of the many possible locations of this dll is used on your system. Use Process Explorer and press Ctrl-D - look in the lower pane and identify the path. It could be something like

C:\Windows\WinSxS\x86_microsoft.vc90.crt_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_9.0.30729.4940_none_50916076bcb9a742\MSVCR90.dll

If you like you can do a binary compare of msvcr90.dll from another system: fc /B c:\temp\msvcr90.dll c:\temp\othersystem_msvcr90.dll

If the files are identical, then there must be another reason for the crash. We need a user dump to proceed and identify the cause. Use Procdump from

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/dd996900 and run

procdump -e winword.exe c:\winword.dmp

Start Word before you issue the command and let procdump run in the background until the crash happens.

If the files are different, try to reinstall the "Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package" and apply Windowsupdate again. You could even try sfc /scannow, but I'm not sure if the file is included in the check. At least the scanfile command failed in my test. You can try to replace the file manually, but it requires some additional effort to circumvent the TrustedInstaller protection: Make sure, the file is not in use (Safe Mode), take ownership, add full permissions, ... (see http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/windows-7-how-to-delete-files-protected-by-trustedinstaller/)