Win98 word error

Well for some reason the Office Program has become corrupted. I would try doing a repair install of Office on the computer and see if that fixes your problem.

If it doesn't uninstall the entire application reboot and reinstall but do not remove any Shared Files when you uninstall or you may very well not be able to get into Windows again.

If that doesn't work you'll have to do some diagnostics to find out if you have a Hardware Problem and I would recommend The Ultimate Boot CD available for download from

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

You can download this burn it to a CD and then set your BIOS to boot from a CD and run the Diagnostics to find out if you have any problems on the system.

But just as an after thought I would try running CHKDSK first just to make sure that you do not have any bad sectors on your HDD which could be causing this problem.

Col

Office is one of the hardest app's to troubleshoot to a happy solution especially when the whole thing has become unstable or corrupt.
It just takes over so much of the registry and system files until it is extremely hard to find the 1 fix fits all type solution for Office app's. Just try running the Repair option from the Office CD to start with, then uninstall and reinstall Office completely.
Try to open your documents in Safe Mode and Resave Them". Also you can use something like Knoppix to boot from that will allow you to read your regular XP hard drive and open Office Documents from the Knoppix Desktop. Knoppix is a version of Linux that runs an entire Operating System from a CD upon booting your machine, so it is not influenced by all the Windows garbage. I use Knoppix as one of my front line Troubleshooting and Recovery Tools. It is a free download and is large but it is worth the effort.
All I can tell you is to try to get as much of the error message, including any numbers and run it thru the MS Knowledge Database or the Office Database to try and get specific fixes using Error Message Data rather than to attempt overall fixes that may not have anything to do with your particular issue.
I have literally spent hours uninstalling Office manually from Windows and reinstalling just to get the same error message that was there before. Now if you want to really learn how to navigate the registry and system files, go for a manual removal of Office entry by entry, file by file, key by key. You will need counseling afterward.
At any rate, there are some good fixes that May Work or usually will work if the problem is more surface or a software-to-software conflict of some sort, but those are big If's.
All I am saying is, be prepared to either purchase a newer version of Office to install over the old, which does not always work or download the newest Service Pack for your version of Office and install it or do the old 2 step of Reloading the machine.

One of the problems I have found with Word is the Normal.dot template file becomes corrupt. Once this is corrupt, several different errors come up. Generally when I troubleshot Word problems is to delete the file normal.dot. Word will recreate this file the next time you open it. Just do a search for normal.dot and delete it. Then try and reopen Word.