In Word, run "Detect and Repair" from the Help menu, and see if that makes things better. Let us know.. Don't forget Open Office It's a free program an will do most everything word does.

You don't happen to have your office disk do you. What a silly question to ask but I'll take a chance.

I'm not sure that 2000 has the detect and repair option...
I found that when I would put dots like this.....after something, it would trigger that error message, so I had to be very careful because I have a habit of doing that. Once you get that message, there's no way around it that I found so that you could save a document....Word 2003 and 2007 are much better about that sort of thing.

I can't click on Help because no doc will open. I can click on the desktop icon for Word but I just get a blank page and "Not Responding" and the error message. I cannot access any Word doc at all.

I save everything so if they sent me a disk when I bought the computer, I will have it and will look. But a lot came installed when I bought it from Dell.

I had no idea there were upgrades to Word as I only know about things they send messages about, like NAV or Windows. As of today, I don't think Microsoft is supporting Word 2000 anymore. If anyone knows otherwise, I'd like to hear about it.

Another silly question so Zep doesn't feel alone ------- Have you tried shutting down and restarting, either the Word program or the whole system? Sometimes that helps when I have problems.

Remember an alternative to word is a free program called Open office see link.

Here is a link that might be useful: openoffice

Yes, I shut down my computer completely every night. Did not solve this problem which I discovered last night before shutdown.

Thanks for the suggestion, Zep. Right now, I'd like to get what I already have up and running. This is a bit of a disaster....

Do you have the whole Office 2000 or just Word? If the whole lot try opening other programs like XL or PowerPoint so a starting point can be established.

If I were you, I would try to open Word in safe mode and then disable all of the add ons just in case that's what is causing the issue.

Click Start, then Run and type in WINWORD.EXE /safe. If Word opens in safe mode, here are the instructions from my MS Word 2003 help files:

Turn on or off features introduced in recent versions of Word
You must have a document open in Microsoft Word to follow these steps.

On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Save tab.
Select or clear the Disable features introduced after check box, and then select the version that you want.
When you save the document, if your document contains items that will be converted, Word displays a list of the features it will convert so that the document can be used in previous versions.

Good luck! If that doesn't help, it could be as simple as deleting or renaming the normal.dot file which is your document template. To do this, with Word closed, do a search of all files and folders in your C drive (usually) for normal.dot. When it is found, right click and rename to something else, like normal.old. You'll probably get a message warning that if you rename, files won't open...that doesn't matter if it's not opening anyway. Try opening Word again. If it opens, it will create a new normal.dot file.

There are also some registry keys that can be deleted, but that is pretty advanced and I won't go into that here.

Pam

There is no additional Word 2000 or 97 support from Microsoft that I could find on the website. But there are support items that probably haven't been updated. One of the old support articles from Microsoft is linked below but that might get you more involved than you wish. But suggest you read it and see. A quicker and easier attempt to resolve your problem might be to do a system restore from a time before the Word problem started? I still use Word 2000 and find it to be a little quirky at times but it is for home use and I am cheap.

Here is a link that might be useful: Microsoft support

Fixed! The computer repairman came today and fixed it quickly by renaming normal.dot. He said he got the idea from an article on the Microsoft website that I emailed to him before he came. I don't trust my own low-grade skills to try this stuff myself.

Thanks to all for offering suggestions and information. You are great!

Here is a link that might be useful: Fix for Word problem

Be aware of anything you might be doing to cause this...I did the renaming of normal.dot thing, but my habit of doing the little.....after a sentence would still trigger a shut down. If I was very careful not to do that, I was all right.