UNIFUNCTIONS Visual Basic Error in Word and Excel

Recently, when loading Word 2007 and Excel 2007 I was getting a dialogue box that told me that the two programs were suffering from an “unifunctions” Visual Basic error. Clicking OK got rid of the box, but it was a bit of a PITA¹ to always have to clear the dialogue box everytime the program loaded.

I’ve figured out the solution to the problem. I had the Nitro PDF program installed on the computer, which I’ve since uninstalled. When the program unisntalled, it failed to delete two office templates that autoloaded when Word and Excel booted-up. Delete these files and you’re off to the races.

The Word file is NitroPDF.dot and is located in the Word startup directory (In Vista, it can be found here: C:\Users\Your User Name\App Data\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP\)². The Excel file is NitroPDF.XLT and is located in the Excel startup directory (just look for the Excel directory in the Microsoft directory listed above).

1. pain in the ass [↩]
2. N.B. The App Data is a hidden directory, you’ll have to enable the show hidden directory option to see it [↩]