Short version – If you run into IE 8 suddenly crashing with a DEP exception after installing Microsoft’s Office Patch KB977724, you need to visit the following link to get a hot fix for KB977724.

Long version –
I spent half a day trying to figure out why I suddenly had IE 8 crashing in Windows Server 2008 while working on Sharepoint 2007 WSS development. The DEP exception would lock up IE 8 with a small dialog box indicating that IE had crashed. I tried the standard stuff – going through the add-ons disabling everything and nothing reliably stopped the crashes – except for running IE with no add-ons loaded. I thought it was related somehow to SharePoint 2007 or possibly an exploit of some sort. A day later I found this post above which doesn’t specifically mention IE 8 – but does work for my situation. I think that SharePoint’s interaction with Office 2007 is causing IE 8 to crash.