'there was a problem sending the command to the program' error message in windows 7 using word 2007

I use Office 2007 32bit under Win7 and at some point I find this error: "there was a problem sending the command to the application". After trying a few recommended fixes including deleting ddexec key and Data key and changing file association a few times back and forth Word was still stubborn. Excel got fixed easily from the preferences. For Word, running

winword /r

from the search box solved my problem. Funny thing though, when I do Open with/MS Word the error is still there, but at least double clicking works now.

I've been having the same problem and this answer really helped!

I had this issue today and found that it was being caused by an COM add-in that was not configured properly.

As a few other people have stated, once Word had loaded, it would load documents quickly, but the inital startup of Word was slow, taking a good 20 seconds to load.

Running it with the no-addons switch pointed me in the right direction:

Winword.exe /a

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/word-help/command-line-switches-for-microsoft-office-word-2007-HP010164010.aspx

Once I disabled the add-in, it works normally - and loads in approx 2 seconds.

This fixed the problem for me too. None of other worked.

None of these "solutions" worked for me.  Here we are in 2014 with a problem that has been around since 2011 and still no fix from MS.  I don't understand why we have to disable or enable either DDE or Run as Admin to get this error to go away, that is not a fix, it's barely a band aid.  Why can't they get to the root of the problem and actually fix it.

I have done everything in all the articles found on google to try and resolve this issue and honestly all it really did was make things worse.