Word / Office 2013 has stopped working

Annoyingly if you look around the web for Word / Office crashing on start up or "has stopped working" you will find thousands of posts all recommending the same thing; start word in safe mode and then disable COM Addins. 

After trouble shooting the issue for 3 hours and trying a variety of things I finally managed to resolve my problem. It seems my users issue was to do with their USB docking station (and the version of the Display link Adapter software they had installed)

I guess I could try upgrading the version of the software, but the user works in a different country so I don't want start uninstalling anything that may cause me to be disconnected. To get them up and running I was able to disable hardware acceleration for office, to do this

Run Regedit
Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common
Create a new Key called Graphics
Under the new key create a new DWORD called DisableHardwareAcceleration
Set the DWORD value to 1

PowerPoint 2010 video problems "Microsoft Office PowerPoint Has Stopped Working"

I encountered a frustrating problem today, I’ve still not really worked out a “final” solution but here’s what I discovered.

A user has a number of power point presentations with videos linked (possibly embedded within) the videos are of mixed format.

The videos and presentations run perfectly on their laptop but on their assistants they do not. In fact on their assistance laptop Microsoft PowerPoint crashes when you try and open the presentation with the following error message “Microsoft Office PowerPoint Has Stopped Working”

I was able to open the presentations with PowerPoint 2003 (using Microsoft Compatibility pack), the base files are in 2007 format (.pptx), if PowerPoint 2003 won’t open the pptx file and you have the following error “No text converter is installed for this file type” simply download service pack 3 for Office 2003.

So people have suggested that once open in 2003 that you could try saving the file as a ppt, this works however I am concerned about what video functionality we may lose by doing this.

I found that by uninstalling VLC media player that I could now open the presentations in PowerPoint 2010 however I am unable to view any of the videos nor am I able to view any of the video properties. I managed to fix this by installing an earlier version of VLC media player (I opted for version 1.0.0 available from VLC’s ftp site http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/)

It seems that the videos in this presentation are “linked” a new feature in 2010 is embedded videos, I think I will investigate this and see if embedding the media resolves this issue.