Why the autorelease pool is necessary in main.m?

Word 2008 suddenly not working on Yosemite Mac

• Word 2008 has stopped opening on my mid-2012 Macbook Pro, running Yosemite 10.10.3. Just bounces a couple times in the dock and then hangs; Microsoft Error Reporting hangs too. No recent software changes that I'm aware of, at least affecting Word. Just happened this last Monday, and I've been cobbling together stuff through LibreOffice since then. I would prefer to get this program going again rather than having to install some new version. Other info: 1) I have a full, nightly backup (TimeMachine on a NAS), but have quite a few updated files since then. Is there a way to selectively restore just Word from a previous backup? 2) While this was a registered version (and some kind of serial number pops up on the brief load screen), it was years ago and I don't have any sort of box (it wasn't even me who actually bought it and installed it). 3) This is the console log: 5/21/15 11:42:32.496 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: WARNING: The Gestalt selector gestaltSystemVersion is returning 10.9.3 instead of 10.10.3. Use NSProcessInfo's operatingSystemVersion property to get correct system version number. Call location: 5/21/15 11:42:32.507 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: 0 CarbonCore 0x961ff291 ___Gestalt_SystemVersion_block_invoke + 135 5/21/15 11:42:32.507 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: 1 libdispatch.dylib 0x9877e0b5 dispatch_once_f + 251 5/21/15 11:42:32.507 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: 2 libdispatch.dylib 0x9877f0d8 dispatch_once + 31 5/21/15 11:42:32.507 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: 3 CarbonCore 0x9617869d _Gestalt_SystemVersion + 1050 5/21/15 11:42:32.507 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: 4 CarbonCore 0x961777c0 Gestalt + 150 5/21/15 11:42:32.507 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: 5 Microsoft Word 0x0064fa0c wdCommandDispatch + 3357284 5/21/15 11:42:32.507 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: 6 Microsoft Word 0x00ad240c wdCommandDispatch + 8086628 5/21/15 11:42:32.724 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: OTAtomicAdd32 is deprecated and will be removed soon. Please stop using it. 5/21/15 11:42:36.022 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: GetScaledBatteryInfo is unimplemented and will be removed soon. Please stop using it. 5/21/15 11:42:49.200 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: objc[15627]: Hash table corrupted. This is probably a memory error somewhere. (table at 0xa0d66a08, buckets at 0x5883400 (262144 bytes), 128 buckets, 6 entries, 3 tombstones, data 0x100 0x30307374 0x100 0x7060405) 5/21/15 11:42:49.200 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: Microsoft Word(15627,0xb0093000) malloc: *** error for object 0x5007000: pointer being freed was not allocated *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug 5/21/15 11:42:49.200 PM Microsoft Word[15627]: objc[15627]: autorelease pool page 0x5822000 corrupted magic 0x00000000 0x04f110e2 0x04f2d053 0x04f20017 should be 0xa1a1a1a1 0x4f545541 0x454c4552 0x21455341 pthread 0x4f2801c should be 0xb04a3000 I assume that from the "corrupted" and misread OS version in there, that means that Word itself is corrupted. I've run the disk repair and permission repair utilities already. Anybody else dealt with anything like this? Suggestions?

• Answer:

  This happened to me when I upgraded to Yosemite about six months ago. I clicked "ok" to download updates, without really thinking about it (before coffee) and it had updated my system and Word just stopped. I googled around and found this was a "thing" and because I had a massive deadline I just went ahead and subscribed to Microsoft online so that I could get my stuff done. I'm still using it ... it's not ideal, but I can get my work done.