When opening Word, Excel or Outlook the following message appears: ‘An error occurred while trying to launch the Remove Hidden Data tool’. I have tried reinstalling Office using two methods: firstly, by repairing and updating the current installation; and then secondly, by deleting the current installation and completely reinstalling. However, neither procedure has been able to resolve the issue. So, not knowing what the Remove Hidden Data tool actually does, I usually just close the message and continue what I was doing without any apparent negative effect. I have scanned the computer using eTrust Antivirus and Pest Patrol, which doesn’t find any threats. How can I stop this message from appearing? The computer is running Windows XP Professional.

The Remove Hidden Data tool is designed to remove personal data, which may not be immediately apparent or visible to the user from Office documents. Examples include metadata included within Office, such as the user name used to create the document and the names of previous authors and editors. For full information on this tool, visit: support.microsoft.com/kb/83442.

Other people have reported having the same error message appear after installing the Remove Hidden Data (RHD) tool. It seems this problem arises because the RHD tool cannot install itself as a menu item within the File menu of the Office application, probably because there is a conflict with another Word add-in. Since you didn’t know what the RHD tool does, prior to the explanation provided above, it seems you are not using this tool. Therefore, the simplest solution may be to uninstall the RHD tool. The RHD tool would not have been uninstalled when you uninstall Office, since the Office settings and custom add-ins are generally not removed when uninstalling Office. To uninstall the RHD tool, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘Add or Remove Programs’ control panel. Look through the list of programs until you find the Remove Hidden Data tool and then uninstall the tool. Once the uninstallation has completed, restart the computer. While the restart is not strictly necessary, it is still good practice. Once the computer has restarted, open an Office application to see whether the problem persists. If the problem persists after uninstalling the RHD tool, you may need to manually disable this add-in from loading when the program opens. When the RHD tool is installed, the Office application attempts to load the RHD.DOT file, which loads the ‘Remove Hidden Data’ menu item in the File menu. It is possible that uninstalling the RHD tool did not remove this configuration, and the RHD.DOT is still attempting to load on startup. So, open an affected Office application (e.g. Word) and go to the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Templates and Add-Ins’. In the window that appears, under ‘Global templates and add-ins’ untick the option for RHD.DOT. Click OK. Then try restarting the application. Should the problem be resolved, try starting another affected Office application to check whether the problem has also been fixed in that program. If the problem continues in the other program, you may have to repeat the same procedure in each affected program to manually disable the RHD.DOT add-in from loading on startup.

In the event that you wish to use the RHD tool, we can try resolving this issue. Firstly, uninstall the RHD tool and then download and install the tool. The tool can be downloaded for free from www.microsoft.com/downloads and search for ‘remove hidden data’. This will rule out the problem being cause by any problems during installation of the tool. Should the problem still continue after reinstallation of the RHD tool, the most likely cause of the problem is the RHD add-in conflicting with another Office add-in. To determine which add-in is causing the problem, we need to disable all other add-ins. Open Word, then go to the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Templates and Add-Ins’. In the window that appears, under ‘Global templates and add-ins’ untick all the add-ins except RHD.dot. Click OK and then restart Word. If Word starts with no error messages and the ‘Remove hidden data’ option is available in the ‘File’ menu (you may need to fully expand the File menu, by clicking the double-down arrows at the bottom of the menu, to see this option) it seems the problem was caused by a conflict with another add-in. Now we need to conduct a process of elimination to determine which add-in was conflicting with RHD.dot. So, go back into ‘Templates and Add-Ins’ and enable one of the add-ins, click OK, then restart Word to check if the problem occurs. Keep repeating this procedure until the problem starts, at which stage you know the most recently enabled add-in is conflicting with RHD.dot. In this case, you could try to find an updated version of the add-in conflicting with RHD, in case the updated version addresses this problem. Alternatively, you need to decide which add-in is more important - RHD or the one conflicting, since you probably will only be able to have one enabled at a time. That said, you can run the RHD tool from the command-line (as explained in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article previously cited). While this is an inconvenience, it does mean there is an alternative way to run RHD apart from using the Office add-in.