Office hangs ("officelifeboathang")

Hello,

I have a problem where Office 2007 programs randomly fail to start up. This
is a problem that happens with any of the Office 2007 applications, and I
cannot predict when it is going to happen.

This is the symptom: I start one of the Office programs (say, Word). The
usual screen will appear, but I cannot work with the program. As soon as I
click into the application window, the Ribbon-style title bar changes into a
Windows XP-style title bar with a "not responding" appended to it.

When I subsequently try to start any of the other Office programs, they all
hang. This occurs independently of background software (I also turned of my
third-party firewall, but the problem persists).

The event log gives this for example:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Microsoft Office 12
Event Category: None
Event ID: 5000
Date: 06.08.2008
Time: 16:47:34
User: N/A
Computer: SEPPEL4
Description:
EventType officelifeboathang, P1 excel.exe, P2 12.0.6300.5000, P3 ntdll.dll,
P4 5.1.2600.5512, P5 NIL, P6 NIL, P7 NIL, P8 NIL, P9 NIL, P10 NIL.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 6f 00 66 00 66 00 69 00 o.f.f.i.
0008: 63 00 65 00 6c 00 69 00 c.e.l.i.
0010: 66 00 65 00 62 00 6f 00 f.e.b.o.
0018: 61 00 74 00 68 00 61 00 a.t.h.a.
0020: 6e 00 67 00 2c 00 20 00 n.g.,. .
0028: 65 00 78 00 63 00 65 00 e.x.c.e.
0030: 6c 00 2e 00 65 00 78 00 l...e.x.
0038: 65 00 2c 00 20 00 31 00 e.,. .1.
0040: 32 00 2e 00 30 00 2e 00 2...0...
0048: 36 00 33 00 30 00 30 00 6.3.0.0.
0050: 2e 00 35 00 30 00 30 00 ..5.0.0.
0058: 30 00 2c 00 20 00 6e 00 0.,. .n.
0060: 74 00 64 00 6c 00 6c 00 t.d.l.l.
0068: 2e 00 64 00 6c 00 6c 00 ..d.l.l.
0070: 2c 00 20 00 35 00 2e 00 ,. .5...
0078: 31 00 2e 00 32 00 36 00 1...2.6.
0080: 30 00 30 00 2e 00 35 00 0.0...5.
0088: 35 00 31 00 32 00 2c 00 5.1.2.,.
0090: 20 00 4e 00 49 00 4c 00 .N.I.L.
0098: 2c 00 20 00 4e 00 49 00 ,. .N.I.
00a0: 4c 00 2c 00 20 00 4e 00 L.,. .N.
00a8: 49 00 4c 00 2c 00 20 00 I.L.,. .
00b0: 4e 00 49 00 4c 00 2c 00 N.I.L.,.
00b8: 20 00 4e 00 49 00 4c 00 .N.I.L.
00c0: 20 00 4e 00 49 00 4c 00 .N.I.L.
00c8: 0d 00 0a 00 ....

This is on a Lenovo T61, Core2Duo processor, 3 GB RAM, Windows XP SP3, all
patches installed.

The only cure for the problem is to restart the whole system (which takes
several tries). It is a very annoying problem because it disrupts my work
significantly and non-predictably.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

G.

I think I could finally pin it down. It seems to be that the hang only occurs
if Skype is running simultaneously. Not always though. But I never had a hang
when Skype was not running.

I had previously installed and then uninstalled the Skype Toolbar for
Office. Now I installed it again and will see if the hangs still occur.