First, let me say, that it's possible that I'm a fluke, and the tale of frustrations I'm about to regale you with is nothing more than the rant of that one guy to whom everybody else responds "works on my machine" but on the off chance that this helps some other poor soul out there, here goes...

 The other day I made the mistake of agreeing to install the OfficeGenuine Advantage add-in for Microsoft word, upon being prompted to when Word starts up. Unfortunately there is nothing advantageous about this little bugger. Once installed, I began to get relentless errors stating that "The function you are attempting to run contains macros."

This had me tearing my hair out, because it didn't dawn on me that the Office Genuine Advantage thing could be the cause, I was thing some sort of exploit I had unwittingly been exposed to, or corruption of my Normal.dotm, or something of the kind. But nay, it was that benign seeming add-in from Microsoft of all people.

My guess is that the cause of this is the fact that when I installed Office, I specifically removed all of the VBA support in the installer options, because I don't use it, and I see it as an area rife with security issues (this may be historical bias, however). The OGA people probably didn't realize that somebody might do this, and so their add-in crashes and burns when Word starts (poor testing guys).

So how do you resolve this? Simple, run Word as Administrator (hold Ctrl+Shift and right click the shortcut to get the option), goto Word Options, goto the Add-Ins tab, the Manage COM Add-Ins drop down and click go (what a POS UI by the way), and remove or disable (uncheck) the OGA Add-in. Next time you start Word it should work great.