Hi, If those suggestions fail to help then, Regarding this error only: Windows keeps telling me Microsoft Word is open In some cases with Windows 7 and Vista. When you try to delete a word document.,you can get a pop up that says, unable to delete because word is open, when in fact it's not. Possible issue / cause: Windows Preview Pane locks files for extended period Vista has a Hotfix for this problem, windows 7 has a work around. That being: Open Explorer, click Organize --> Layout and deselect "Preview Pane" on the view options. Then delete the file or document. Restarting may help the situation too.

I must take issue with snidely's item #2 re automatic Windows updates. A few years back there was a real problem with some HP computers that had AMD processors. This may have been the update for SP3, but my memory can't say for sure. The machines went into an endless reboot loop. My desktop was one of the affected ones, as was my friend's. There was finally a "fix" issued by HP which we were able to employ. My HP laptop, also with an AMD processor, although a different one, was not affected at all. I have also had minor problems with some of the .Net updates, so I always install those separately from other updates. Just my experiences, so one does learn from those not to just blithely set automatic updates. Obviously snidely is not a mother, or he would know that 13 year olds can be very sensitive and sometimes overly dramatic. This has nothing to do with good parenting, so he would best keep remarks about such to himself. I am a great grandmother as well as a former school teacher (12, 13, 14 year olds), so I have seen it all.

Shutting down for 15 minutes is not necessary. Shut down completely and instant start - not a restart will do the trick there. Word used to be terrible for returning the memory to the memory pool when the program was closed, one would assume MS fixed that long ago. We are talking MS Word? How much memory does the computer have? When you check how much free space was on the hard drive it exceeded 20% hopefully?

I have been working at finding away to change the default font on all documents since this thread started. No matter what I clicked on the starter version came up so I thought that might be my problem. I finally uninstalled MS Office Starter and MS Office Student and Home, then just reinstalled the student and home. I still could not get the font style to stay at what I set it. I thought about what was said about the 2003 version and opened a blank page, set the font and single space, went to file and chose "save as". A menu came up and I chose to saveto my desktop as MS Word 97-2003 Template (.dot) and made a shortcut, so far it has held. In case some else is still having this problem I am posting my results. None of the other ways worked for me, a new document always came up with Office's default settings.