When did a custom install of Windows 7 on my office PC, I had to reinstall all my applications. Those included Paperport 11.1 and Microsoft Office. When I took this opportunity to start using Office 2007, little did I realize that the installation of Paperport would render Office 2007 virtually unusable, with Word usually crashing upon startup.

I discovered this was due to an incompatibility between Office 2007 and the Paperport toolbar installed in Office. I was able to solve this problem by deactivating the Paperport Toolbar by running the following from an command prompt that had been run as an administrator:

regsvr32 /u "C:\Program Files\ScanSoft\PaperPort\PPDFAddin.dll"

Where C:\Program Files\ScanSoft\PaperPort\ is the directory into which Paperport was installed.

Paperport is one of the few applications for managing a collection of scanned files, but it has a terrible reputation for bugs not being fixed until interim or follow on releases, which generally require additional payments by existing users. Bug fixes are not generally rolled out. This is a particularly egregious example: how can your product not be compatible with Office 2007? How absurd.