I have been using EndNote X1 with Word 2007 since last December with
no problems. Last night MS did several automatic updates to Vista
(32) on my machine and, whether by coincidence or not, Word will no
longer start except in safe mode. Furthermore, every time I try to
start it without using safe mode it freezes on start up while
displaying “Running virus scan” at the far left of the Word status
bar. Furthermore if I force a shutdown of Word I get in error box
saying that “EndNote X1 encountered an unknown error.”

I tried shutting down my virus checker (Trend PC-Cillin 2008) to no
avail. I also tried doing a repair on EndNote from the EndNote
installation program also with no success. I have found several
discussions which suggests that EndNote can trigger this problem but
I've seen no solution and the EndNote tech people have not gotten that
to me on this one as of yet. Probably the most discouraging
discussion I have seen is at

http://www.tutorials-win.com/WordDoc/Word-wont-299921/

where an Office MVP is quoted:

Office MVP Beth Melton recently reported her discovery that "If
there are any WLL add-ins in the Startup folders they will trigger
this message even if the user doesn't have any type of virus
scanner enabled. Apparently, MS is using the virus scanning engine
to check for macros in WLL files and as a result it triggers the
message. Note other than checking for macros it isn't actually
performing a virus scan....One add-in I know of that still uses a
WLL is EndNote." So you might check your Word and Office Startup
folders for ..wll files.

Word and EndNote are the two most important tools of my trade and I
desperately need them to work together. I suppose I could restore the
system partition from my last image prior to the MS upgrades but that
would obviously only be a temporary solution—and it assumes that the
upgrades are responsible in some way which may not be the case.

Any help greatly appreciated—I desperately need Word and EndNote to
work together!