Hello everyone, I hope (though I'd rather not) this topic is still somewhat recent.
I have a similar problem, Publisher crashes after seconds after doing anything in the document. I'm just using it to give some cover letters a nicer look at the moment. The issues started to appear yesterday with said document at about 15 pages, so there's nothing too crazy going on here in terms of masses of pages, high quality images etc.. At first it seemed that only this particular document is affected but after setting up a new one, the exact same issue appeared with the new document being only 3(!) pages large. I already de- and reinstalled Publisher, restarted the computer (Windows 10) multiple times and updated Windows to the most recent version, nothing seems to work. Also the Thread mentioned above didn't help (I only found one of the mentioned updates to be deinstalled). I had no problems with Publisher before whatsoever and now I can't get it to work anymore. ☹️