I'm running Office 2007 on a high-end, Windows 7 SP1 desktop system. Today, Word abruptly stopped working. When I run it, it hangs on the startup splash panel and goes no further. It will not open in "safe" mode either. I've repeatedly attempted to run it from both the Start Menu (with no doc/docx file reference) and from File Manager; it hangs just the same. Rebooting has no effect.
My other Office 2007 programs (Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) all start instantaneously and exhibit no problems; only Word is broken.
To see whether it might fix the problem, I kicked off a 'repair' on Office 2007 from Control Panel. The repair process hung at about 95% complete. After awhile I canceled it; Windows Update said 'Canceling setup...', but the cancel also hung.
The only thing that's changed from yesterday was a couple of security updates that executed this morning in Windows Update. These were not specific to Word or Office, so I don't know that they had anything to do with this issue.
I tried moving Normal.dotm to another folder, but no change. I checked the Word\Startup folder, but it is empty, I tried running winword \r to evoke the "Register" command, but nothing changed.
Any advise appreciated.
