Other folks here are more expert than me, but in past circumstances with crashing office docs I would find windows and office the culprits: empty trash bin; find all temp and tmp folders and delete all files in them (some will be open, just ignore them); run disk cleanup. I use ccleaner and defraggler pretty often. Others here will argue to avoid ccleaner's (and all other) registry cleaner, but it works for me. If none of that works, start windows in safe mode and repeat cleaning. See if you can open word in windows running in safe mode (I've never tried it, but what the heck). start word in safe mode (winword /safe) and test it. You may have a normal.dot (no m) you can try renaming (its in my C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates). Run a virus scan. Please report back if you try any of this. Thanks, Matthew