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).
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.
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.