Word 2007 Not Responding When Shutting Down

I have an annoying problem that has gone on too long. No one at my office has
this problem so it has to be something in my PC. I'm running Vista/Office
2007 with all of the updates. When shutting down Word at the end of of the
day by either closing out the last document I'm working on OR shutting it
down with no document open, Word goes into "Word Not Responding" to "Word
with try to recover" to "Word will search for solutions" to a complete
restart. It's very annoying for two reasons: I either have to wait for it to
complete this cycle OR always keep a document open during the day so it
doesn't start the cycle.
I have no COMM Add-ins. I have also deleted the HW Key Data File I found in
another post. Searching the KB and this forum hasn't turned up any solutions
to try. Anybody out there have a similar problem and/or solution?

Another common culprit is Normal.dotx. I would try renaming it and see if
that helps.

Also... you said you deleted your "HW Key Data File". I'm not sure what that
is, but if you're not referring to the data key in the registry, it's
located here for Word 12/2007:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word

It's not a file -- it's a location in the registry. You would delete it by
editing the registry using the registry editor.