This is relatively old news. But I had to dig back into it this morning when I discovered some strange behavior on the part of Office. After installing this month's round of patches I discovered that my instance of Microsoft Word would no longer function properly.

Double-clicking documents would bring forward Word but not the document. I could run documents through the Open command, but not via double-clicking. Attempting to close a document caused Word to crash completely.

There's an old trick when Word sees problems such as these that invovles resetting Word's "Data" registry key. This REG_BINARY key, found at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\version number\Word\Data, includes many of the user-level customizations done to Word (a list of them can be found here), and sometimes can get corrupted for some reason or another.

The simple solution is to rename this key and restart office. Similar to what happens when you rename the normal.dot/normal.dotm files to do the same with a corrupted Word template, Word will rebuild the Data key when it sees it has been deleted.

Doing just this process brought my instance of Word back from oblivion and got me back to working relatively quickly.