Office 2010. The only thing that will run is Excel.

[FremontPC]

Banged my head against this for hours. Winword, MSPub, Outlook, you name it all fail with "The application was unable to start correctly" with an error code of 0x80000003. Googled that and every variation I could find on the error code, no joy. Event Viewer shed no light on the subject. Ran the MS Fixit tools to remove Office 2003, 2007 and 2010, uninstalled other suspicious titles, HDD checked good, CPU was slammed through most of diags and troubleshooting, so every diag choice came with a time penalty. Reinstalled Office 2010, same story. Supremely irritating, time consuming and frustrating. Norton was installed, so I naturally suspected it, especially when the analysis function in DebugDiag wouldn't work, especially when the CPU was slaving so that it took ages to do anything. Yet DebugDiag did leave a text file in the logs that turned out to be very useful. Victory was finally mine.

What do you think was the last thing that got called before Winword (et al) exited with a 0x80000003 error?

 

[NJW]

With cliffhangers like that, you should be writing for television.

 

[MDD1963]

Some cryptolocker variant's post cleaning results?

 

[FremontPC]

No, it wasn't a 3rd party issue.

 

[TAPtech]

graphics issue?

 

[FremontPC]

I'd thought that it could be some issue with Catalyst Control Center, but no other apps were acting up. It was entirely MS, as it turned out.

 

[MDD1963]

One-Drive?

 

[FremontPC]

No, but once I found out what it was, it immediately made sense. Once I removed it, not only did all of Office work fine, the system was a lot speedier.

It was EMET.

For some reason when I checked Programs and Features, it simply didn't register and I glossed right over it.

 

[MDD1963]

MS's own EMET, ....preventing MS Office from operating? (Good catch!)

 

[FremontPC]

MS's own EMET, ....preventing MS Office from operating? (Good catch!)

All but Excel, which ran fine. In my flailings (Office repair function), I actually did get Word to run a few times, but no go after that. DebugDiag lent the victory, but itself wouldn't run properly (the analysis function did a faceplant). Had to go to the folder that had the .dmp files and open the .txt file in that folder to get the clue. For all it's failings (in such an environment) DD ended up being the pivotal tool. NB, when you add a process to monitor, you can only add running processes, you can't browse for an .exe. I had to attempt to start Word and let it error out so Winword.exe would be listed in the processes.