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Why on my Windows 9x/Me system do I have a lot of General Protection Fault crashes while I'm using OpenOffice.org applications?

Well, GPF crashes are very common on Windows system and, of course, not all are caused by OpenOffice.org applications! However, even OOo might trip over what Microsoft calls a General Protection Fault.

OpenOffice.org is an integrated Open Source Software suite of applications based on the computer code released to the Open Source community by Sun Microsystems; a similar version is also sold separately by Sun(R) as StarOffice(R). Some features of StarOffice(R) are still held under Sun's copyright. The checkspell and the help system are examples and OOo versions continuously progress.

Due to the nature of Open Source Software development, sometimes features of the OOo suite may simply not work, not work as expected, or suffer an unsightly GPF termination. The OpenOffice.org developers' community is certainly working very hard to improve the software! Much has been done, but much more remains to be done. You, as a user, can give your help by using the Issue Tracker section of the OpenOffice.org web site.

If you are convinced that you have found a reproducible **bug** (not a one-time-only crash) in an OOo application, report it in the Issue Tracker. As a community, OpenOffice.org is striving to find and fix all issues, and your help is appreciated.


At the OOoAuthors.org FAQ collaboration, Rob Winchester added the following tips to help stabilize your Windows OS, which may help to minimize General Protection Faults on your system.

First it is very important to apply the OS updates, even though they are from Microsoft. There are some flaws, pick that chin off the ground, in some important MS library files that have, in fact, been fixed, but you must update your computer. After you perform the update(s) and reboot(s), you need to search for and rename a .dll file in other applications folders. This file is named MSVCRT.DLL. It should only be in a windows (or winnt) sub folder (subdir). Using search, ignore what you find under c:\windows (or c:\winnt). Rename MSVCRT.DLL to old-msvcrtdll.old (or something you can remember). Do not attempt this until you have installed all the microsoft updates completely.

To get the upgrades:

  1. Open Internet Explorer (yes, IE - not Netscape or any other.)
  2. Go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com. You may have to let MS install a small program to search for what you need - and this might require restarting IE (or maybe rebooting).
  3. Check off everything it will let you (some are only able to be done one at a time), then download.
  4. Reboot.
  5. Repeat (yes, go back and see if any more files (optional or critical) are there. This is a big pain over a dialup line.

Note that this will help everything run better. It's especially important for Win9x users, due to its unstablility.

You also NEED to empty your temp files folder regulary (and manually). Under 9x it's usually C:\windows\temp. Close all programs. Open this folder. Edit->Select All. Hit delete. Then Yes and maybe Yes to all later. You want to empty this folder completely. Then empty the recycle bin. Make a routine of emptying the temp folder - MS Office is especially bad to this folder and many, many help desk calls are related to this issue.

Documentation / User FAQ / General / Previous-Next