I use MW when i'm typing a long response because genius here (me) making typos all the time and mindsay doesn't catch them all lol. On my old computer word always screwed up but not on my new laptop......as often.

Hopefully that'll help or it might be the blogging gods creating havoc for you everywhere....fuckers

OpenOffice

It's free! Screw microsoft back

You're welcome I stopped using internet explorer a few years ago for the same reason, but it got better more recently when I had problems with firefox and had to resort back. I think sometimes there's badly written updates that automatically download themselves. I think microsoft also tends to program things very large and unnessessarily complex (look at the system spec of office or vista) - and there's a lot to go wrong. I think a lot of crashes happen because of an information overload, like when too much is going on for the computer to handle.
If there is some sort of spyware on your machine though, there are non-microsoft programs supposedly capable of finding them, if it helps. I have a free one called adaware (free stuff tends to be better made I think bcause it's by genuine enthusiasts without commercial interests)