Hello All,

I have been working through this one for awhile now. I will try to be as detailed as I can about this, because I have tried just about everything I can think of at this point...

I bought this ASUS E205SA for my wife about a year and a half ago and it came pre-installed with Windows 10 and Office 365. A few months later, she would be using Word and the screen would frequently go black, flash back on, and most of the time it would crash. -"Word has encountered an unexpected problem...". We were almost up on the 365 subscription, so I decided to purchase Office 2016 Pro.

Installed Office 2016 and it did the same exact thing. She didn't really use any of the other Office programs, but I noticed it would occasionally happen with Excel as well as with Powerpoint. This last week, I have been laid up, so I have been able to dedicate some time to it...

It runs fine with no problem in Safe Mode - but before anyone says, "well, there's your problem, you have an add-on that is screwing things up", I'm not running any add-ons when I'm not in Safe Mode and it is still crashing.

I re-installed Office 2016. No change.

I did a reset of Windows 10 (kept user files). No change.

I chatted with a nice lady at Microsoft Support for about 2 and a half hours and after she played around with it for that entire time, she said that I had a corrupt user profile and needed to take some specific steps to fix it. This included deleting the offending user profile, creating a new profile, uninstalling Office, and reinstalling Office. NOPE. Didn't work.

I even uninstalled it again MANUALLY, ensuring (I think) that I got rid of all of the registry keys and every other hidden file that Microsoft leaves in there even after you do a regular uninstall. REINSTALLED AGAIN, and am still having the same problem.

I checked my video card driver to make sure it was up to date because a couple of forums that I visited indicated that this might be the problem. Video card up to date, no change.

I found a couple of forums that indicated that it could be a couple of different programs that could be conflicting with Office. After I reset Windows, there is literally nothing on the computer besides Windows, other necessary drivers and a couple of other pre-installed programs like Explorer and Edge, etc, Google Chrome, and Office 2016 Pro.

Saw another possible solution where someone brought up a lack of memory issue. Still happens when Word is the only open program.

I ran a scan with Windows Defender - no threats or viruses detected.

Now, through all of this, I do have a couple of clues, but I just don't know what to do about them...

First - I noticed that Word will immediately crash if I open a .doc file. This doesn't appear (so far) to happen with .docx files. From the limited testing I have done, if I open Word and if I browse and select a .doc file to open, AND I select the down arrow on "Open" and select "Open and Repair", Word will not crash. This is wonderful, but slightly inconvenient.

Furthermore, if I convert a .doc file to a .docx file in Safe Mode, I will be able to open it as a .docx without Word crashing.

I have been focusing so much on Word, I haven't looked at Excel yet, but I expect I will find the same thing going on there.

This leads me to believe it has to do with the file type, but WHY??? AND of course HOW DOES ONE FIX THIS?

To add to the mystery just a bit more, occasionally this will have an odd effect on one or more open tabs in Google Chrome if I have it open as well - the graphics wont refresh right and becomes unreadable. But this happens very rarely. This brought me back to the conflicting programs idea again, but it still crashes when Chrome is not running.

I hope this was clear enough - if anyone has any idea besides throwing this POS computer out of the window and using it as target practice, please let me know.

-Samsonite