Word 2007 crashes on Server 2008 R2 terminal services

I think i've made progress! Microsoft recommended i add WINWORD.exe, EXCEL.exe and Outlook.exe to DEP (Data Execution Prevention). (Silly I know considering it's a microsoft product!)

So far so good - havnt had a crash for 6 hours considering we would have up to 12 crashes in 1 hour. I'll keep you posted.

If you wish to test for yourself follow the instructions below.

• Click Start, click Run, type sysdm.cpl, and then click OK.
• On the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.
• On the Data Execution Prevention tab,
• Make sure The option "Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select" is selected
• Example: Add: c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\excel.exe
• Add all exe files for Outlook, word and excel.

* UDPATE *

Just to let you all know im confirming the above solution has resolved our problems with Word/Excel etc freezing up.

Try removing KB977724 That seems to have resolved the issue.

We should have thought of this earlier, but running Word 2007 in XP compatability mode stops the crashes. This is a workaround, not a solution so I'll leave this open for a bit in case anyone else has a better solution.

The fact that Word runs fine in compatability mode suggests that this really is an issue with 2008 R2, and not a quirk of this particular installation.

JR

I wanted to provide an update on this issue.

Microsoft analyzed a dump file created during the word crash and they said it is probably a known problem. Fixes for Server 2008 R2 and Office 2007 are in the making, but they cannot tell any release date.

They told me to run Process Monitor during a crash which i will do today to further analyze the problem.

update: I think i have found something which is worth testing.

In Hyper-V Manager i allocated 4 CPUs for the Terminal Server Virtual Machine to improve performance.

We have another Terminal Server 2008 R2 with less users than on the problematic one but also with Office 2007 SP2 installed. 4 Weeks ago i changed the CPU Ressource Allocation on that Terminal Server in Hyper-V Manager to use only one processor.

Since this change i have not noticed any word crash on that Terminal Server.

So i will try to set cpu back to one on the problematic server to see if this is the problem.