OLE Hangup?

I know this topic has been posted many times on the "Internet," but everyone
seems to have different circumstances.

When my students embed a Word document as an Object in Excel (the Insert tab
-- Object way), some get the "Microsoft Office Excel is waiting for
another application to complete an OLE action" popup and some do not. What
about their machine, their setup, their whatever... would cause this and how
do we get around it without a hard restart?

Thanks for your time.