Microsoft Word not responding

Hi, elfpower, and welcome to Apple Discussions.

I only have 2 GB of memory and a lot of files, but I've deleted everything I can spare.

If you mean you only have 2GB of free hard disk space available, that's your problem. Memory is something quite different, and 2GB of memory is just fine.

Your operating system needs a minimum of 5-6GB of free space on your hard drive at all times for its own temporary files. Optimally, you should try to keep at least 8-10GB available on the hard drive. So if you're down to only 2GB now, you're going to have to delete an absolute minimum of 3-4 GB, and preferably more, of data from the drive to regain the use of the computer for ordinary purposes.

The easiest way to do that without actually losing data is to buy an external hard drive and copy data onto it, then delete some of the duplicated data from the internal drive. You probably don't have enough room on the internal drive right now to be able to burn a CD or DVD, so copying data to those types of media isn't an option now.

Can you tell us which MS applications you have that are not working? If MS Office, is it 2004 or 2008? Have you run a permissions repair? How big is your HD? 23GB Free is not much on a 320GB HD, but it is plenty on a 100GB drive.

Open Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility) and then click on your hard drive in the left side, then hit Repair Permissions. This will take a bit.
Reboot the computer after it finishes.
If Office 2008 still doesn't work, try removing and and re-installing it.

With a 100GB HD, you should have enough free space. After you have done a permissions repair, you may try to do an office database maintenance. To do this, quit all office programs. Open your applications folder, then open MS Office 2008. Open the "Office" folder and go to "Microsoft Database Utility". Double click on it. If you like to do things stepwise, run "verify database". If you like to go directly for the gusto, click on "Rebuild database" and let it run.

See what happens. If this fails, then you can UNINSTALL your version of MS Office by opening the "additional tools" folder in MS Office 2008" and running "Remove Office". This will allow you to re-use the same ID and license without wasting one.

Hi.

I have an iMac and all my MS applications have ceased working as well. Done as suggested to no avail, would prefer not to reinstall as this would use up one of my licenses.

Cheers,

M.