Our Mac Word98 installation is corrupted ?

[Greg]

My wife has two Macs, a 2000 iMac and a newer iBook. They run slightly
different versions of OS9, and the same version of Word 98. She has
recently encountered some strange behavior: for instance, the Undo
icon on the menu bar has changed to a Pen instead of the familiar
curving arrow. And--it doesn't work for multiple levels of Undo. It
undoes everything. In general, her menu icons have "re-arranged"
themselves. And when she selects Format from the menu, she no longer
sees "Columns" as an option to select. She works extensively with
highly-formatted Word documents, so this is driving her crazy.

Has anyone experienced this creeping corruption? How can you repair an
install of Word 98?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Greg

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Greg,

Check the View menu of the problem machine and be sure she does not have
"Word 5.1 Menus" checked. If that's not it, post back.

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Greg]

ThanksB, Beth. Before I saw your reply, I noticed that she DID have
Word 5.1 checked off, so I de-selected them. However, what finally
seemed to do the trick for us was this: I found the Normal document in
her Microsoft Word folder, and opened it. The menu ikons were back to
normal. I proceeded
to waste a lot of time experimenting with Undo/Redo. I think it's fine
now, but when you test it too much, it doesn't behave the way you
"think" it should. Don't mean to be so kryptic.

Anyhow, thanks for the help!

Greg

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Greg,

Sounds like she has/had a corrupt Normal template. If you continue to have
problems, test the Normal template by renaming it (with Word quit). When
you relaunch Word, a new "clean" Normal will be created. If the problems
are gone, you can trash the old Normal. If there are customizations in the
old Normal that you don't want to lose, copy them over to the new one using
Organizer before trashing the old file.

Hope this helps.

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>