Word, Excel, Office 2013 Crashes On Open Windows 8

If you've picked up a new computer with Windows 8 and a shiny new version of the Office 2013 suite, but you can't seem to get it to work right because it keeps crashing every time you open it, the first place you need to look is with the Add-ins. While there are a slew of addins that "might" cause the problem, I ran into one specific add-in that was causing one of my customers all sorts of grief with both Word and Excel. Powerpoint seemed to work just fine, and that's another way you can kind of test to see if it's an addin problem or not. Powerpoint doesn't usually have the same addins that Word or Excel do. Since Office 2013 and Windows 8 are still fairly new, bugs can sometimes run rampant with 3rd party softwares that supply addins.

The one specific addin that I found to cause an issue in my situation, was with the Abby Fine Reader 9 Sprint software which sometimes comes pre-loaded on new computers. Looking in the registry, this was the common denominator between Word and Excel.

The specific location can be found at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Excel\AddInLoadTimes
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Word\AddInLoadTimes

I hate to say it, but I deleted the addin keys before copying them down, but just look for something that says "Sprint.9..." and delete it. There should only be one key for Word and one for Excel. I downloaded the updated version of Abby Fine Reader and the odd thing is that during the install, it had an option to integrate Abby into Office and Outlook, but they were both grayed out and unchecked... Makes me wonder if they left the integration in the software, but disabled it due to the problems with Office 2013. No idea.

I also need to note that when updating to Abby Sprint 9, it did NOT remove the registry keys for the addins. Looks as though they have to manually be removed.