I opened MS Word the other day to face this prompt that “The Visual Basic environment could not be initialized”! The same message popped up (twice) when I closed Word!

A help button was more informative, saying about “insufficient memory” and “low disk space” — but I have 8GB RAM and 6TB in my hard disks, with 300GB free and available on my system SSD drive.

The same help message said that the problem may appear if the Normal template (normal.dotm) is damaged, or if some VBE7.DLL is the wrong version, or if I have not access to the temp folder! As is usual with such help messages, this one too proved absolutely worthless. Nothing helped, and Microsoft Help pages on line proved equally irrelevant!

The problem was fixed simply, without changing anything at all in my system settings, without installing or registering any dll or other files or creating a new normal template. I started Word by right clicking its icon and selecting the option to run it “As administrator”. Word opened now without errors and the next time I opened it again, not “as administrator” now, but as usual, with a single click on its icon, it opened without errors and popups. If you face the same problem, start from this fix. After all, you don’t have anything to lose if you open Word once “as administrator”. In case that this fix won’t work for you, then you have all the time of the world to search for something else until you find your way. Enjoy!