The other day I got a blue screen (first time in years) while I was working on a Word document. I lost 2 hours of work because I had "Quick Save" instead of "Backup" checked. Then I thought I had lost all my documents, whether they were open or not, because they all reverted to TEXT format. I have many tables and they all became vertical strings of words and numbers. The other clue was that the fonts all became Times New Roman (a font that I rarely use).
After messing around a bit (and changing "Quick Save" to "Backup") some of the documents seemed to be OK. Then some of them were screwed up, again. At first I was really puzzled, and then figured out what was happening. When I go to File/Open, the document is screwed up. The same thing happens when I open a file from Windows Explorer by double-clicking. However, if I open it from the drop-down file list, it's fine.
Now I'm in the following situation: when I first open a file, it's messed up, so I close it. Then the file appears in the drop-down file list, and when I click on the same file in the list, it's OK. I am really confused and need help.
I've been using this copy of Word 97 for 10 years without a problem.
My computer is a Pentium 4, running XP (SP-3), with 512MB RAM, and plenty of HD space. I should mention that I've had problems with IE, but don't know if there's a connection. I hope someone can suggest something I can do about this.
