Application Hangs, in the Application Installation & Compatibility forum on BrianMadden.com

Have you tried disabling DEP protection yet? These sorts of application faults can occur with DEP enabled as DEP halts execution of any process that tries to run code from NX flagged memory addresses.

You can turn on DEP for "essentials windows programs and services only" via the System applet of the Control Panel or disable it altogther via the boot.ini parameter /noexecute=AlwaysOff

What I would do in this situation is install User Mode Process Dumper and set it to catch the crashes of winword, excel, etc. Once installed and configured, it will start generating .dmp files in a directory of your choice. You can then have those dumps analyzed.

If you need help analyzing the dump files drop me a line here and i'll be glad to assist.

--Mike

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E089CA41-6A87-40C8-BF69-28AC08570B7E&displaylang=en