MS Office Word 2007 Won't Open, please help

[vanmsword]

Hello folks, I'm getting a weird error with my MS Word. It's worked fine for about two years, but is now unable to open files. If I click on a file that I know has content in it, the splash loading screen appears and then I get an error that simply says:

(X) Windows cannot find 'D:\Van's Folder\Documents\File.docx'.

Make sure you typed the the name correctly, and then try again.

This is obviously almost impossible to google. I've looked up several "MS word 2007 won't open" issues trying to figure out what's wrong, to no avail. The one lead I have is that I recently turned off the very annoying Permission To Continue features on Vista, as well as Norton Antivirus, which I hate and never installed. I think I may have turned off more than I should have, but I can't find the page that showed me what to do to undo it. I know when I first did it put me into Safe Mode and took me quite a bit to figure out how to get out of it.

I am not sure what I might have done that caused the problem, but I've noticed a few other programs that also won't work anymore. (My CuteFTP program tells me that there is a problem loading the Conducent and needs to be reinstalled. My AIM sometimes works after a reboot but sometimes doesn't. Later versions of both CuteFTP and AIM work, but I can't simply download a later version of MS Word.)

I seem to remember going into my task manager and turn off anything with Norton's Symantec in the title. I think this may be the problem, but I have no idea how to fix it. Please help.

Thank you,

Van

[spacesurfer]

Do you have only Norton Antivirus or do you have the internet security as well (with the firewall). If you disable the firewall, it could have locked down some of the apps from running.

Instead of opening word by double-clicking on a word file, does word open when you click on it's shortcut?

Have you tried navigating to the office folder and double clicking on winword.exe to see if it opens that way?