Internet Explorer crashes when you open an Office document in a Sharepoint portal

Problem: IE (7 and 8) crash when you try and open an Office document (word, excel, etc) that is part of a document library in a Sharepoint portal/site.

Fix:

- Check your MS office installation folder (typically: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office)

- If you have 2 Office folders (named OfficeVersionNumber: Office11, Office12), then you probably have the same problem as me.

Basically there are 2 versions of Office on your machine and the version that is causing a conflict for IE when it tries to load the Office document from the Sharepoint site.

The specific DLL the conflict arises in is called “OWSSUPP.DLL”

- In my case we have Office 2003, so it should use the OWSSUPP.DLL in the Office11 folder, so all I had to do was rename the OWSSUPP.DLL to OWSSUPP.bak in the Office12 folder.
Once that was done – everything started working properly.