word pad

[crockett]

anyone know what would cause word pad to mess up....it worked fine about 2 weeks ago now when i try to open it,I get a error message that says "run time error" I barly ever use this program but it has done this several time before..the only way to fix it is to remove it and reinstall..but why should I have to do that......grrrrrrrr microsoft...help me someone

[daveleau]

Go to Start/Settings/Add Remove Programs

Click on Windoze setup at the top (a tab)

Click on Accessories and then deselect Wordpad.

Click ok. and then click ok again.

Go back to Add Remove Programs and then into Windows setup and then select Accessories. Replace the check mark next to wordpad. Make sure you have your Win95/98 disk handy.

It should be reinstalled and working fine.

Good luck
Dave

[crockett]

yea thx.i mean i know how to reinstall it..what im wondering is why dode this keep happing to me,,is it a common problem with word pad..or could it be some conflect with another program

[daveleau]

Sorry didn't mean to insult your intelligence... http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/redface.gif I've never had any problems with it.
Dave

[crockett]

ahhh lol i dont have much intelligence to insult..lol np

[qball]

I haven't a clue as to why wordpad 'messes up'.

But, I may be able to shed some light on what is causing grief. The 'runtime error' you refer to is caused by missing or 'incomplete' files that wordpad uses. Wordpad was written using microsoft's C++ foundation classes. This means a lot of the functionality for wordpad exists in the foundation class libraries.

In other word's you need more than just wordpad.exe to run wordpad. You need the runtime DLLs (dynamic link libraries). Now this is all fine and dandy. It should be fairly easy for one to see if a dll was missing, one would have problems. The insidious part comes when apps actually link to a given library, either by version of that library or a SPECIFIC library. Yeah, so? you say.

The problems really start compounding when you realize that install programs run willy-nilly over a systems dlls, overwriting without prejudice. If that dll is the wrong version, or overwrites a dll with a specific link, all hell can break loose.

Additionally, UNinstall programs can potentially remove needed dlls if the user is not wary.

Hope this high altitude overview is informative (I already know how scary it is...).

[psyklone]

well ...

wordpad is shell dependent (i'm pretty sure ... notepad definitely is), so if you've done any installing of '3rd party' shell programs then that could cause the problem.