I had an issue where word 2007 and word pad were crashing the second I tried to start them up. After 4 hours of banging my head against a wall (and deleting Templates/*.dotm, destroying my registry etc) I saw a post that fixed the issue.
My default printer was pointing to a device that wasn't reachable (in my office, I'm at home currently). Once I changed the default to the XPS printer, issue is resolved.
