"Fwedfwelldown" <Fwedfwelldown@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote ...

> "It isn't a Word problem and would probably be better answered in a Vista
> Newsgroup as it looks like a Vista problem.

Hah! That's pretty funny; looks like we're all pointing fingers Things
like the File, Open dialogue are enabled by shared libraries which ship as
part of the OS, but which are only used by applications. So to an OS guy, it
looks like an application problem. To an application guy, it looks like an
OS problem!

I've heard that people use computers for word processing, and photos, and
stuff ... but personally, I never do. I'm only interested in the
semiconductors. Notepad does all my word processing :-)

> However, this problem is normally because there is a dead mapped drive or
> other invalid link set in Explorer.

So, was this (dead network drive) the problem you were seeing? Or did was
your machine free of dead mappings, yet Office and OpenOffice still crashed?

Technically, an application could *hang*, when it tries to access a dead
mapped drive, but it will rarely crash, per se. Actually it isn't even hung;
just unresponsive, because it is waiting indefinitely for the network
connection to respond (well-designed apps implement a timeout). A truly hung
application has hit Deadlock - a logic roadblock, which prevents further
processing. An application crashes (in the precise technical sense) when it
hits an unrecoverable user mode error condition, such as an improper memory
reference, a corrupt heap, divide by zero, etc. These all have standard
error codes, such as 0xC0000005 "access violation", etc. From the user's
perspective, in all three cases the application has stopped working, so it
has "crashed". There's not always an easy way to tell why the application is
no longer working, without seeing some internal information: either by
attaching to the application process with a debugger, or finding error
messages in the logs with diagnostic information.

Often when an application crashes (ie genuinely crashes, as opposed to
merely hung or unresponsive) it will log an event in the Application log or
System event log, entitled "Application Error". If you can find any such
errors in your Event Logs, it will go a long way towards diagnosing the
problem.

Cheers
Andrew