I have Office 07 and despise it. I have Office 03 on my office computer and will drive in to the office on weekends or at night to write a letter. I only use 07 if I know I won't have to make any changes or mistakes. Office 03 is basically the same old word processing from the early versions. They completely changed everything around in the 07 version. I had letters to write today and spent my Saturday in my office to do them. What I also do is compose letters on Google Docs (which is easy) and download them to Word. Sorry for my rant, but I just hate what Microsoft did to Office 07. BTW, this is how my screen appears on 07. For whatever reason it keeps double-spacing. I have it set to single but it keeps double spacing. I sooo hate this program! Sorry for the rant... Jane

Thanks for the thoughts, I think it is not resource overload, and I'm using only the XP home firewall, pretty transparent I understand. I'm running on a recent Gateway Notebook, in this case and on a recent Dell Desk Top in the other, the DT has no problems. I will admit my Gateway does have some difficulties on Com1 (simulated via USB, of course). I'm still using dial-up and it uses Com1, as does my Palm Z22 sync connection. I can not run both at the same time for that reason. Further, and Gateway did send me a prepaid shipping carton to send the Notebook back for repair as the dial-up will establish only one connection per boot. When I hang up the phone line, I have to reboot to get it to work again. I'm about to go DSL here and decided not to send the Notebook in, loss of data and a lot of other concerns being top of my reason for living with the Com1/Dial-up problem. I suppose this could reflect back into my new MS Office problem The installation of MS Office was a purchase DVD. The Notebook did come with Office 2007 ready to install, but I uninstalled that some time back as I was using Open Office, need commercial use. So, Gateway believes the machine has enough resources to run Office 2007. I can take a look to see what's going on with the resources when in the stuck-state. As noted, Control/Alt/Del will not allow me to kill Word, for example, also I note Work knows it is in trouble and tries to send an error report to MS, I think it sometimes succeeds sometimes doesn't. The only way I can get Work (or PP, or Excel) to release is to hang up the Dial up. I may try a reinstall, but am reluctant as I have still to update Office via the Dial-up, about two hours of download time.

Some computers come with a free 30 version of ms office, but I deleted mine rather then pay for it, because if I was going to buy it, I would have gotten a disc in my hand instead of "downloaded version" because I am parnoid that I will lose the number and get it deleted, and not be able to install it. But, I would not make any changes without back up disc of the OS. Is it HP? You can order them from HP if it is less then two years old. I used to have a sony lap top and it came with microsoft money, and games that took like all the memory, so I kept deleting them, but that would make the whole system not work. Things could be different now. I have deleted microsoft office and no problems yet, but I have the back up disc in case. I bought microsoft office, because it was a cheap as microsoft word alone, but it did not work for me. I returned it for a full refund and bought just microsoft word which was all I needed. I don't know if any of this information will help you, but it always better to have recovery discs before doing anything. If you don't have them, you can returnd the computer to somewhere like best buy, and have them reinstall it. But, I have heard horror stories. Even if you pay to have someone else restore it to factory specs, it may or may not work the same.

i finally installed oo 3.1 and it was able to open the spreadsheet. now getting 3.1 and getting it to work, well if you are interested that was a real interesting adventure! in case this helps anyone else i'll copy and paste it here. i posted this at the oo bullentin board, see link below. this is the final resolution: this is going to be difficult to explain but i have solved the problem and i have to admit i am impressed that i was able to do this! here's what i did after i posted this - 1st, instead of going to the web i opted to open an application i had. i clicked on oo 2.4 and it opened a window. from there i clicked on a link to do the download, 150 mb! it took about 45 minutes. but i still had ver 2.4. i realized i had to open the installation file that mozilla was showing me and when i double clicked the downloaded .exe or php file it started the install and i knew i was on the right track. that took a good 20 minutes and i told it to remove the 2.4 stuff. when done the icon for oo 3.1 writer on my task bar did not work! there are now 4 icons the 3.1 version put on my desktop. only the "oo org" 3.1 icon would launch oo and it was 3.1 so i could now use oo. but the other icons for impress, calc, writer and the task bar icon for writer all failed to work, they'd launch a window saying that it could not find "swriter.exe", trust me this is pretty confusing stuff for me! so i could get to oo 3.1 but only using the icon for "oo org" 3.1 so i right clicked the 3 icons that gave the swriter.exe error and looked at the properties. all 3 were going to C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenOffice.org 2.4\program which shouldn't exist as i told it to remove the 2.4 software but it did not put the correct target address for the 3.1 programs and i recognized this as screwy. i looked at the properties for the 1 icon that would launch oo 3.1 and the target was exactly the same as the 3 icon's targets that were 2.4 but it had 3 in the address - C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenOffice.org 3\program\swriter.exe so i changed the target in the icons that generated the can't find swriter.exe error. by doing that the 3 icons on the desktop went from being a white backround to bright colors and a larger icon! low and behold when i click on those 3 and the icon for the writer on the task bar each one launches the correct software! like i said, i am impressed i found this and was able to fix it, i can't imagine anyone would figure this out it just seems too cryptic! heck i even was able to open the spread sheet that started all this! i hate messing with stuff, i want it to work. i am not all that pc literate and i worry that if i change anything i'll mess something up. i have to admit this was NOT easy to do. oo does NOT provide a correct download/installation. if this happened to me it must be happening to everyone. so not only did this process fail to remove some 2.4 files but it loaded the incorrect target address for 3 icons (using the C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenOffice.org 2.4\program\swriter.exe address)! makes me wonder..... Here is a link that might be useful: open office setup trouble shooting forum