ABBYY crashes Office 16, Winword and Excel on Win10

This documents a problem not posted but solved by a friend. I'm posting it because when he called MS for help the solution was the first thing the tech suggested and I could find no reference to it on this site or anywhere else; therefore, it must occur often and should probably be documented.

After installing Office 16, the new WinWord and Excel kept terminating with the useless "Windows explorer stopped working." and "We'll notify you when (that means "if") a solution is found". It continued getting worse until the computer started crashing.

When he called MS and described the problem, the first thing the tech asked was, "Do you have ABBYY installed?" The answer: "Yes". When he removed the program the computer and Office 16 worked fine. ABBYY is an OCR program. For him, it was installed by an Epson scanner.

Wow, thanks for the post. My Win 10 Office 365 2016 was working just fine a week ago. I just recently installed ABBYY and it's been crashing ever since. Glad I came across this! I'm going to uninstall ABBYY and see what happens. The version of ABBYY that I used was also from an Epson printer. Thanks for the tip!