My PM 7.0 began crashing about a year ago on my Win 7 machine.

Question

There seemed to be no definable reason, and it was only occasionally, so I wasn't too bothered. But now I can't work for more than 15-20 minutes before it will either freeze, or crash the program completely.
Even after I've just cleaned the Registry, a RegClean report run immediately afterwards showed 42 errors, with the first 2 being:
Invalid File or Folder  #####  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.p65\ShellNew\Filename  #####  C:\Windows\ShellNew\PageMaker.p65
Invalid File or Folder  #####  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.pm6\ShellNew\Filename  #####  C:\Windows\ShellNew\PageMaker.pm6
Why it references PageMaker.6 & 6.5 I've no idea. Is that a clue? Most of the other errors reported relate to "Speech\Engines\SR\en-US" for some unknown reason.
I have spent many hours running it in all the provided compatibility modes, all to no avail. I have even tried running it on my Win XP Pro machine but it crashed there too.
So I'm wondering if there's an error in the pub itself. It will often balk at some point when converting (currently a 36pp pub) to PDF. I remember seeing a PM menu command to "check publication for layout errors" or some-such, when PM would beep if an error was found. Can't find it now, though.
I see there are many of you in this forum having problems running PM 7 in Win 7 and beyond, so did anyone ever discover a fix?

Answer 1

So I'm here on behalf of a customer. They are running Windows 7 Home edition. They have been using this program on this computer since they bought it in 2012. This was prompted by them being unable to use PM6.5 any longer so when they bought the new computer, they contacted Adobe support and through a series of misinforming emails the customer was able to buy PM7 and then an installation disc was sent to them. From then until this morning they were able to use PM7 without any issue. Yesterday a tech had gone out to clean up her computer because it was so infested the customer could no longer do anything without the computer locking up or flooding itself with ads.
Scouring these forums I've seen, more times than I care to count or recollect, people saying that they've gotten it to work on WIn7 and that it was never built to play Win7 in the first place. That's fine and dandy, but no one is saying how they got it to work. I'd love to know this as the customer seems unwilling to change to InDesgin. While I haven't had the "its a real possibility you will have to change" conversation with them, part of the misinforming email mentioned above was Adobe trying to force her into InDesign and she caught it before payment and switched it to PM7.
I've run this program in every able compatibility version both as user and admin. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the software running the install as user and admin multiple times. After the first installation it installed PMv7.0.2, which is the most recent version I believe. Installing the associated software, adobe distiller, doesn't help either. During the installation I get 2 errors: one telling me the unInstaller didn't install so I may not be able to unInstall this product, and another telling me that there was an error creating the registry set. The installer then continues its process to finish and I'm still unable to open it.
I'm toying with the idea of setting up a virtual XP machine holding only this program so the customer can use it whenever she needs to, but if I can get this running another way I'd love to do so.