I had a problem with Word crashing, preventing me from, well, doing anything, really, except for wasting time on the Internet….
So I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Office, removing fonts (fonts caused problems back in NT4), I tried to disable templates, autorecovery, and background pagination. Then I saw that even Wordpad was crashing.
Suspecting some evil DLL installed by something, I fished around for some debugging thingie, and found the most excellent Microsoft Debugging Tools, which told me it was some evil HP printer network driver that was killing Word.
Turns out I had previously set up a network printer, so I could print to the color printer on Suzie’s computer. And since I have no working printer on my computer, I had set it up as the default printer: This was what was making Word crash. Once I set something else as the default printer, Word stayed up.
This experience also gave me a chance to check out OpenOffice, which looks good (but still has a problem with reversed parentheses).