I have a new laptop running Vista home premium and installed MS Office Profession 2007. It was working great until a couple of weeks ago.

Both Outlook and Word crash right at the beginning. Outlook at least opens the window, but as soon as I try to open or read email it crashes.

Word doesn't even open a window. It crashes as soon as it starts. In Task Manager, it doesn't even show up as one of the applications, but it is one of the processes.

I am able to start both using Outlook /safe and winword /a.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

-and as Word is used by Outlook as an editor, it could explain both problems.

I'm back. I was premature in saying it was fixed. The only time I am able to open Word or Outlook is when I rename or delete the Normal.dotm file before I open an application. Is there a way to permanently fix this so I don't have to delete this file every single time? Thanks.

Although Krash disagreed, I considered it highly likely that Word was a prime culprit.

Have you tried running the Office diagnostics in Word?
It may be a corrupt module that is cauing Normal.dotm to become corrupt on exit.

To get to diagnostics, click on the Office symbol top left in Word, select Word Options at the bottom of the dialog box, then Resources (left pane) then Run Microsoft Office Diagnostics.

Very unlikely.This sounds more like addins , but I could be wrong.

My theory is that if it was NORMAL.dotm , its unlikely that the programs would open in SAFE MODE. Especially Outlook , even if it is opened in SAFE MODE , uses Word 07 as the editor for new emails.

If you manage to open Outlook in SAFE MODE , try disabling the Addins from Tools --> Trust Center --> Addins

You can do the same with Word. If this works , then you can enable some of the addins at a time and open the applications to figure out which one of them is the culprit.

It seems that I needed both suggestions for the problem to be solved. I started with the easiest, by renaming the Normal.dotm file. That solved the crashing of both Word and Outlook.

Then I had to rename an add-in because it wasn't allowing me to receive emails. All I did was rename an add-in just in case I actually needed it.

Thank you very much for all of your help. I hope this will permanently solve the problems I've been having.

Have a nice day!

It is on the laptop drive, not operating on a network.

Where is the normal.dotm template file located?

Is it on the laptop drive, or are you operating over a network?

Uninstall and reinstall Word, having first deleted Normal.dotm?

Could be as simple as a corrupt Word template file.

Search for "Normal.dotm" (note that it really is .dotm, not .dot as in earlier systems) and relame it to Normal.old (or delete it).

Word must not be running when you do this
You must have options set for showing hidden and system files
You will probably get a better result searching for *.dotm, otherwise many irrelevant files appear to be found.

Word will create a new clean one when it next runs, with default formatting.

Tried that and it didn't solve the problem. Any other suggestions, please?