Ms Word kills WinME

[CardUK]

My Mother's PC is running ME with 184Mb RAM and 500Mhz AMD (do not know full spec).

It has been working fine for a couple of years however it has recently crashed every time Word is launched. It moans about lack of available resources (even though all other programs are fine including more intesive ones). And occasionally displays a message along the lines of....

"General Protection Fault in Module USER.EXE @ 0003:0000Fa1"

When it hangs it properly hangs Ctrl-Alt-Del does not work or anything else. Occasionaly you get a message saying would you like to free resources by closing down processes listed in the Task Manager (or the ME equivelant) but at first glance all the tasks that are being carried out are legit.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled Word but the same errors happen. (I installed Excel and powerpoint as a test and they work fine).

How can I fix it? (I have heard of memory / resource leakage but do not know / understand what it is?

Thanks

[Cricket]

Windows 9x (which includes ME) will degrade over time and can become very flakey (especially if you install and uninstall a lot of programs and utilities all the time). Once it becomes fairly flakey, about all you can do is save all your personal files to CD-R or some other media and then format and reinstall WinME. Trying to track down and fix the kind of problem you're describing will be just too time consuming and frustrating.

Cricket

[CardUK]

I was afraid of that - Thanks Cricket

[Miz]

Try searching the harddrive for the "normal.dot" (that's dot, not doc) file and deleting it. If Word still locks things up when you try to open it, then Cricket's suggestion is the way to go.

[CardUK]

Thanks for that miz - it bloody worked.....!

Can you tell me why please? What has deleting that file done?
I got my mum to do it over the phone - but it apepars as though it was a template file - though she wasn't that clear on the file path....

[azscary]

normal.dot is the template file for Word.

If you open a Word document and then set your font sizes, margins, font etc. and then save it to the normal.dot file, every time you open a new document it will open with those specs.

[GaryRouth]

It's possible a [hopefully long-gone] virus corrupted the file. It's rather a favorite target. If you go to the TrendMicro main web page, click on Search, and enter "normal.dot" = you will get no less than 261 different pages of virus info on nearly as many viruses corrupting that file. [for example: http://www.trendmicro.com/search/goo...=&q=normal.dot ]

It'd be a good idea to run a full system scan with the latest definitions to rule out any current infection.
. . . Gary

[CardUK]

thanks folk