Saving Word Files

[jv]

I'm using Word '97 in Vista. Worked fine until I created a table doc. For a
while it saved fine but then while pressing save, error said it could not
save and my doc is now gone. I saw a "rescued" doc but it came up in
gibberish and I had to select a "convert" option, none of which seems to
convert to English text.

I gave up and started re-creating my doc and saved it quickly. Once again,
I got the same error. I found a temp file (~wrkxxxx) but that showed one
line of gibberish and error that said to convert the table to text and try
again, but there was no table in this temp doc.

Does anyone have any advice on how to (1) fix the save problem and (2) is
there there a conversion option that works for English text?

Thanks.