Microsoft Word Freezing Repeatedly, Application Not Responding

Question

Just wondering if anyone else was having issues with Microsoft Word from MS Office 2008, where you open the application, you type a few sentences, and the application freezes with the spinning circle of death that won't go away until you click the dock where it says "application not responding" and do a force-quit? You can leave the circle spinning for 10-20-30 minutes, and it never goes away.
Now for the weird part--this error only happens for me when I'm using a specific document on my computer. I can open Word, start a new document, type several paragraphs of text, and it works fine. But I've been working on an existing paper for about two months that all of a sudden started causing these freezes/crashes when editing it. It's about 30 pages roughly, no images, no big inserts that would take up a lot of memory (116 kb in size). And up until today, there were no problems. So why all of a sudden can't I edit anything on this paper without freezing the program?! I downloaded the Microsoft Office 2008 Service Pack 1 that was just released after this problem started, and ran all the recent Java and program updates through Software Update with computer restarts. I even copied the text from the Word document I was working on, pasted it into a new document, tried saving it as both .doc and .docx, and again the program still freezes when working with that text in a new file. This one baffles me. It's like the text within a document is somehow freezing the application. One thing I did notice is that the freezes seem to happen when I'm scrolling using a mouse wheel. Not always, but quite a bit. I suppose this is some memory issue related to several pages of text that the program can't render or process when you add new lines of text or scroll, but again, I can't figure why this paper I've been working on for months all of a sudden decided to start freezing Word today. Can you really only have 30 double-spaced pages of text in Word before it crashes?
Looks like I've found my reason to switch to Open Office, since I'm 3-4 days out from a deadline. Any other solution strategies would be welcome. Thanks.

Answer 1

Same problem here - Microsoft Word 2008 (update 12.1.7) will open fine, and then start the spinning pizza of death. Only way out is to force-quit the app. I've tried:
1) deleting plist and font cache files
2) uninstalling MS Office 2008, reinstalling and then re-applying updates 12.1.0 and 12.1.7
3) confirming that Apple's Font Card.app can verify all fonts
No luck. Currently I can't open any MS word doc without the spinning pizza of death.
If you are lucky enough that these symptoms only happen with a specific Word .doc file, I would see if the PC-originator could re-save the file as .RTF and resend. If you can then open it OK, you could revert back to .doc (or .docx) format. RTF format is Microsoft's interchange format. If there are anomalies in the .doc file, saving as .RTF can sometimes clean them up. Once done, you can revert back to native MS Word format.
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