[Solved] Writer "Not Responding" on Doc Launch

[St00f]

Hello!

I have suddenly run into the issue of OpenOffice Writer freezing with the note "(Not responding)" beside the doc title in the top bar. Sometimes I can close it by right-clicking the Writer tab in the Windows taskbar, but sometimes I have to open Task Manager to close it. It always happens upon launching a doc, whether I open it via the Writer "Open file" option or via Windows Explorer and it doesn't matter what document I'm trying to open.

I was using version 4.1.7 when this began today, so I uninstalled it and installed the latest version, but the issue hasn't changed.

I've tried searching through the forum and other online sources, but haven't found a solution yet.

TIA

[FJCC]

I suggest you reset your user profile. To do that:
Close OpenOffice

Open any folder and enter
%appdata%\openoffice\4
in the address bar near the top of the folder window. That will take you to a folder containing a folder named user.

Rename user to user_old.

Restart OpenOffice. You should get the registration screen. Fill that out and check if Writer is now stable.

[St00f]

Darn, that didn't seem to work. And I'm now seeing both the "user" and "user_old" folders in there, if that makes any difference.

[FJCC]

Seeing both folder is expected. Did you get the registration screen when you restarted OpenOffice?

[Hagar Delest]

When you close AOO with the task manager, do you see other soffice.bin processes?
Sometimes there is one in particular that eats a lot of memory and once it's been killed it comes back to normal.

If no change, try to switch to LibreOffice, very similar to AOO but much more actively developed, less of such bugs.

[RoryOF]

Start Windows in Safe Mode and run OpenOffice, using /File /Open to open the file; if it opens (give it time), immediately Save As in .odt format, and continue to work in that format after restarting Windows.

[St00f]

Seeing both folder is expected. Did you get the registration screen when you restarted OpenOffice?

Yeah I did go through the registration.

[St00f]

Holy cow, I feel so silly! I just restarted my computer and it's fine now.
I was having the issue while at work yesterday and I didn't have time to restart it due to other tasks. It would have saved me a big headache. Haha.
Thank you all so very much for your input!! I'll return if the issue pops up again and keep troubleshooting with your ideas.

[RoryOF]

If a file does not open, as you said, another fix may be to start Task Manager (Ctrl Shift Esc) and kill any soffice processes shown in Task Manager. Restarting the computer usually does the same thing. If I used Windows, I'd do both (belt and braces!).