Having the same problem, and having followed the instructions above (for which many thanks!), Office still got hopelessly stuck each time I tried to open a dialogue box. Now I had my desktop appearance set to "Windows classic" (matter of aesthetic preference). Just as an experiment I reset the appearance to "Windows XP". Lo and behold: this fixed it! The strangest thing, however, is that since then I put all my desktop and folder settings back to what they were at the time the crashes started occurring. And as far as I can tell Office still works properly... Very peculiar indeed.