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Fixing Office v.X crashes, revisited
I have been battling a situation for the past two months where all the Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) were crashing during startup. The backtraces I would get for these crashes all looked similar (see below). The office programs always died as they were being launched (or immediately afterwards) somewhere in the CoreFoundation code.
The behavior was a little strange - the Office apps would come up and appear on the screen, but as soon as I clicked on any of the menu items (ie., the File menu) they would crash immediately. Little by little I started seeing this same sort of crash in other third-party and Apple-supplied applications as well (Media Player, QuickTime, and even iDVD) and these programs would not even come up. They would crash somewhere in the middle of being launched before they even appeared on the screen. I followed the instructions on other threads on macosxhints.com which involved removing and rebuilding font caches and/or un-installing and re-installing the entire office suite. These techniques did not work for the problem I was having. The problem on my system turned out to be a corrupted .plist file. Specifically, it was $HOME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.internetconnect.plist which had an error. I found the problem by running the apple-supplied plutil program which checks the syntax of plist files. I ended up writing a shell script to scan all the plist files in the system preferences and my own user preferences directories and I've included that code here in case it might be helpful to others. If you're having odd M$ app crashing problems, I hope this fixes the problem for you. It was sure a relief to me when I got this one figured out. On the other hand, having the problem crop up in the first place helped me discover NeoOffice which I now use all the time and very much prefer to Microsoft Office. For what it's worth, the Genius I talked to at the Genius Bar in the Apple store near my house was not able to offer any useful advice outside of "re-install your OS" (using the Archive/install method) which seemed way too drastic of a solution for a problem like this. Apple should really provide some easy-to-use GUI for finding/fixing corrupt plist files (ala the disk permissions repair utility) so that more people don't put themselves through needless OS re-installs to fix relatively simple problems like this... Here's the code for a plist-checking script you can run which calls plutil for you to check all the .plist files in the most common directories where .plist files live. Just cut-and-pase this code into a file and run it as a shell script.
and here is an example of a typical backtrace I was seeing when Excel, Word, etc... were crashing on me whenever I tried to launch them:
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