winword.exe error

In MS Word 2000 on a PC with Windows 2000 Professional, I get a message saying winword.exe has created an error. This only happens in a specific users profile. All other profiles have no problem with Word. I finally discovered that the user had gone to another office site and had a printer setup as default so she could print at the remote office. When that printer was deleted and one of the local network printers was selected as default, the error no longer occurred. Can anyone tell me what caused this problem?