Microsoft Word has stopped working… BLAH BLAH BLAH
Q: I have Microsoft Office Word 2007 running on my laptop (well, it runs most of the time anyway), and I keep getting this message: “Microsoft Word has stopped working… BLAH BLAH BLAH” then it tries to solve the problem, then Word restarts. This is wasting alot of my time every day because it takes so long to restart.
A: This problem seems to be most common on Vista, not XP or Windows 7. There’s a debate about what actually causes this. The super-duper-uber-techs don’t know, so they will tell you it’s a virus every time just to get you out of their hair. I suppose it could be a virus, but so far none of the over 100 cases of this error that I have worked on were a virus. I’d like to say that it has to do with a Word add-on malfunctioning, such as an OCR or scanner program, I’ve fixed several by removing the offending add-on.
The best way to deal with is to go into Regedit and delete the following keys:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Office/12.0/Word/Data
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Office/Word/Addins
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Office/Word/Addins
You probably recognize that Data key! I think Microsoft put that key in there just to make sure Word crashes often enough!