Here’s an oldie but a goldy that I came across again today. Client has a brand new Windows 7 workstation running MS Office 2007. Workstation is fully patched and updated. When opening MS Word the Word splash screen would appear, but then nothing further. We worked through the usual process of ensuring the machine was fully patched did a repair installation of MS Office, and so on, without success. It turns out that there was a little cheapy Dell inkjet printer shared on the network somewhere that this particular user had connected to. For whatever reason, Word has a strong dependency on installed printers, so due to some conflict with this Dell printer driver, Word was hanging on startup. Delete the Dell printer, and it’s associated driver from the workstation and happy days! Everything back to normal.