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We have a problem with Word 2007. In Options > Add-Ins, under "Active Application Add-ins", it shows two loaded .dot templates that do not exist.

In the "Name" column, it shows the full path to the templates, the same as in the "Location" column.

This location does not exist - it's actually the STARTUP folder from the user who installed the products that the templates are from:

C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP\template.dot

This is on a Citrix server, and so this folder is removed when the user logs off. However, every user on the server is seeing the entries in Word Add-ins. If you go through the add-ins menu and try to remove these templates, Word crashes ("Word has encountered a problem and needs to close").

In addition, since these were first installed, Word crashes with the same error when you try to close it (I assume because it is trying to unload add-ins that do not exist).

We have tried creating the location manually, and placing the templates it's looking for there. When we do this, the Name column from the Add-ins screen changes to only displate the "template.dot" rather than the full path. However, any attempt to remove them through the add-ins menu still results in Word crashing.

Any idea on how we can remove these entries (and also how they got there in the first place)?

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  • Remove and reinstall Word? Dec 19, 2013 at 18:19
  • It's being scheduled. However, as I don't know where this information is coming from (I had thought Word only loaded the templates it could find in its designated template folder(s)), I can't be sure this will clear it, so was hoping someone else might know.
    – Dan
    Dec 20, 2013 at 8:32

1 Answer 1

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Found where these entries are stored. One of the values in:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data

The short version is that deleting this key (with Word closed) solves the issue.

Still not sure exactly how the issue started, but what had happened was that the default and/or temporary user profile had managed to get a copy of the above key from the admin user who installed the software. An additional problem on the server meant users were often getting a temporary profile when they logged in. As a result, they kept getting this corrupt default profile, and so were trying to load the files from the other profile. There's currently a bit of a loop going on due to the temporary profile issue (the corrupt Data key keeps getting copied back in if the user gets a temporary profile), but that's a different problem for a different question.

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