Just my observations.....I am retired and use MS Office for my personal use only after many years in the business world. I have been using the 2003 version for many years and have been very happy with it. I could do any and everything I wanted to without any thought. I had to purchase a new computer that came with Windows 7 and find that the 2003 version of MS Office is not compatible and I am FORCED to upgrade to 2010. It is definitely different and has a learning curve to it. Now I have to spend a lot of time finding how to do what I used to do with no thought. I wish I didn't HAVE to but the "powers that be" (Microsoft) do not allow you to have a choice, they force you to change whether you want to or not, whether you NEED to or not. Point being, whether you want to or not, eventually you are going to HAVE to upgrade. Your only decision is: now or later. Good luck!

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

I have never seen Open Office offered in firefox install has anyone? I have seen it offered in some other updates like java and flash in the past. also make sure when you do firefox updates and the browser reopens to a new page other than your homepage to close it and reopen it again because it only does that the first time to let you know that it did update properly it does not change the homepage the next time you reopen it will be to your usual home page. It will do the same thing if you had any updates for your add-ons it will open to that page to let you know the update was successful. If you did install Open office it will be listed in your add remove programs list in control panel.

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.