After installing Adobe Acrobat 5.0, Word crashes every
time I try to open it. First, I get "Winword.exe has
generated errors", followed by "Can't find the specified
application".

Acrobat hooks into Word and places a couple new buttons on
the Word toolbar. Evidently, this is the cause of the
error. If I uninstall Acrobat, Word functions normally.

Has anyone encountered this and know how to fix it?

Yes.
Adobe puts the Word plugin into:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\Startup
Delete or move PDFMaker.dot from there.
Bad Adobe! Bad!
I haven't figured out why it works great on so many
computers but crashes consistently on a few, even when
uninstalled and reinstalled.
There's an Excel plugin named PDFMaker.xla in:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\XLStart
if you have trouble with that.

>-----Original Message-----
>After installing Adobe Acrobat 5.0, Word crashes every
>time I try to open it. First, I get "Winword.exe has
>generated errors", followed by "Can't find the specified
>application".
>
>Acrobat hooks into Word and places a couple new buttons
on
>the Word toolbar. Evidently, this is the cause of the
>error. If I uninstall Acrobat, Word functions normally.
>
>Has anyone encountered this and know how to fix it?
>.
>