I’m a big time user of Microsoft Office. I’m constantly using Outlook, PowerPoint, Word and Excel. For the past couple of years, I’ve been using a PC laptop running Microsoft Vista.

If you’ve used Vista, you know that there always seems to be a problem (at least there has been for me).  Once every couple of months, Word crashes on me. I can’t open documents by double-clicking on them and I can’t select text. It’s very frustrating. Each time this happens, I have to go and look for the solution online. I found out that it’s a problem with a corrupt file in my registry.

Even though I’m planning on upgrading to Windows 7 eventually, I thought I’d go ahead and post instructions on how to fix this problem:

1. Exit all Office programs.
2. Open the Registry Editor by clicking on your “Start” button and typing “regedit” (without the quotes) into the “Start Search” box.
3. Locate the following registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
4. Right click on “Data” and rename it to something like “olddata.”
5. Exit Registry Editor.
6. Start Word.