Having Issues with MS Access Crashing? Try These Solutions First
If your copy of Access is crashing please try the following strategies to get it stable again:
- Make sure your PC has the latest updates, including updates for Microsoft Office
- Verify your PC does not have a reboot pending after installing updates, (you will see “Update and Reboot” or “Update and Shutdown” when you go to turn off your PC
- Run the Office repair tool, see https://support.office.com/en-us/article/repair-an-office-application-7821d4b6-7c1d-4205-aa0e-a6b40c5bb88b
- Perform a decompile:
- Open the Run command by pressing [Windows] + R
- Type MSACCESS /DECOMPILE
- Open the database you with to decompile,
- Open a module and select Compile from the Debug window
- Compact and repair
- We do this so often we have an acronym for it: DCCR
- Check your references are not missing:
- Press [CONTROL]+G
- Click on the Tools menu and select references
- Make sure none of them have the word MISSING next to them
What techniques do you use when your Access database has an issue? Let me know in the comments.
Regarding your list of to-do’s it is the same as mine except that for the 4th on the list, “Perform a decompile”, I find it easiest to exit Access and run MS Access from the command line with the name corrupted database as the 1st comman line parameter and “?repair” as the 2nd parameter.
Here’s a short batch file I use for this purpose as I’m in the same (huge) Access app much of the time:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\MSACCESS.exe” “MyAccessDBName.accdb” /repair
Pause
The pause following execution is there so I can see that the repair has run and run successfully.
The other steps you list, especially 1 thru 3, are very important too! Lately I’m finding that those MS updates issues occur more often than database corruption itself. And the symptoms are indeed “unpredictable results” (on steroids).
But the 4th step works better for for me as it’s quick, safe and sure.
Thank you for your primer, as indeed this problem happens often.