Auto Update Causing Office 7 Program Not Responding

I have been having problems with simple functions in Excel, Word, PPT, (Office 2007 Enterprise) causing the applications to go into "Program Not Responding" mode. Some (such as attempting to bold a word or number) come back in a few minutes, others (such as 'save as - pdf') never come back.

Running a repair from the Office installation CD fixes these problems, until the next Update runs. For awhile, I was repairing Office daily. Now I've gone to doing updates manually every few weeks and then repairing Office.

I ran an update this morning and aftewards tried Office just to see if the problem of "Program Not Responding" had returned. It had - so - I ran repair again from the Office CD and it is gone.

Would love to get to the root of this problem and be able to have Auto Updates run and not have to keep running the repair.

Suggestions?


2 Mar 2010 - I'm thinking my problem may really be VPN based. Today, rather than connect to VPN immediately (I'm in a home office connecting to the company network), I tried working with my Office apps, accessing the mapped drives and shared printer from my home system and everything worked fine. I then started VPN and things seem to be continuing to work fine.

I'd seen other comments about this issue having to do with accessing mapped/shared resources, so, I wonder if by starting VPN immediately, it has trouble with the connection to resources on my local network, whereas, if those have already been exercised before starting VPN it is happy?

Are you positive that your copy of Office is legit or do you have the infamous "Office Enterprise Blue Edition"?

Could be a completely different cause, but for the last month I have been having similar problems where excel 2003 would go into 'not responding' mode whilst trying to do the simplest of things (e.g. changing text colour, format painer, bold, etc). It was driving me crazy & taking an age to update anything....
After lots of research on various forums, I first thought the problem was being caused by recent automatic updates - tried various suggested solutions but none worked.
Finally managed to solve my particular problem by simply changing my default printer settings (had recently bought a new wireless HP printer, supposedly W7 compatible, & had set this as the default printer). Since doing this, my Office 2003 apps work just fine again.
Coincidence, or a problem with the printer software - I'm not techy enough to know the answer, but would be interested to find out whether anyone else has had similar issues with the same solution?