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Corruption of Word files

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by tonydee 2 views

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I've been working with Word for several years. I also work at a public computer center in a library helping patrons use computers.

A few weeks ago, someone was working on a Word file on a floppy. Everything was going fine, then the patron looked up and there's hieroglyphics on the screen, most of the text is lost. I couldn't recover the entire file. Word didn't complain when opening the file, brought it up without hesitation, but there were a lot of symbols on the screen, page breaks, and very little of the original text.

Thought this was something the patron did, but tonight, the exact same thing happened on another machine with another customer. Could this be something Word is doing when doing a background save? The Save Options are set to Allow Background Save; Save Auto Recovery Every 10 Minutes, Embed Smart Tags, Embed Linguistic data.

I don't that it's virus related because these machines are locked down pretty tight. You can't even install an application on them unless in the admin account. Additionally, the virus definitions are update weekly.

Compaq Evo, Win XP Pro, Word 2002.

Thanks - Tony D

4 replies

by gralfus

I had a manager that this kept happening to and it turned out to be his floppy drive that was going bad.

We see this a lot at work, but that is related to working on a file located on a network drive. When the network experiences a "burp", people lose connection to the session and bye-bye file.

What location is Word using as its backup location? Is it someplace that users don't have permission to write to (local hard drive, or network drive)? [Tools, Options, File Locations], Also check to see if Word is making a local copy of files stored on network or removable media [Tools, Options, Save, Make local copy...]

by tonydee

Working on Word file on Floppy on local machine. Maybe
floppy drive related, but doubt it because it happened on 2
separate machines, both are less than a year old.
Suspect problem may be with background saves occuring
with a full floppy. Read this somewhere else and haven't
been able to duplicate it.
- Any other thoughts?

by pbolden

I would try using a different printer usually a laser printer. I had a similar problem and it was the dot matrix printer causing the word document to look corrupt. Also try selecting the printer before opening up your word document.

Good luck...

by janicemh3528

I had the same problem and I wasn't working with floppys. I researched on google and one article said Microsoft Office 2000 partnered with KMT Software and that macro viruses might be part of the problem. KMT advised me to update my 2000 version of their products because the security certificate had expired. Another article said that if you save too many similar documents -e.g. invoices in the same format, Microsoft locks them into the Normal.dot template of Microsoft Office. The Normal.dot template is most likely corrupt and the only solution I can think of is uninstall Word and then reinstall it again.

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