A friend of mine is writing a book due to be published next year. Her manuscript is in a single Word file which, as well as the text, contains all the photographs for the book as embedded objects. Unsurprisingly the file is very large -8 MB. Her original picture files were mainly jpg files, but a few were bmp files – all are the result of scanning her printed photos.
Claire’s laptop is a Toshiba Satellite 310 CDS with a Pentium MMX running at 200 MHz under Windows 95. The Hard Disc is 2GBand she has 96MB RAM. The Hard Disc is seriously full and frequently complains of lack of space. She is using Word 97.
A few days ago when Claire opened her manuscript file, several of the photographs had disappeared, each being replaced by a big red cross. The crosses are no discreet affairs like you get in the corner of a place-marker on a web page whilst it is waiting for the pic to download – they are big fat red crosses from corner to corner of the space that should be occupied by the photo. She manually replaced the missing photos by over-writing the affected pages from a backup copy. The repaired file was OK for 24 hours but then “The Phantom Red Crosser” struck again, this time replacing nearly half of her photos with red crosses.
I have transferred a copy of the ‘infected’ file to my computer. My virus scan gave it the all clear. The affected photos still show up as red crosses on my machine so it is not just a display problem. However, it appears that not all red crosses are created equally. On some of them, if I double click over them, the missing photo opens up in the Picture Editor that is launched from within Word. On others, when I double click, the Picture Editor contains – yes, you’ve guessed it -a big red cross.
What is going on here? Where are these big red crosses coming from?
