Word 2003 causes video failure

[FalcoPilot]

I am running Windows XP Pro, SP2 fully updated. I have up to date Norton
Internet Security and regularly and recently ran a full virus check. The
system is 1 Ghz, 1.2 GB of RAM, Intel Pentium III . I have Office 2003
Professional. I have a Radeon X700 video card with 256 MB of memory and the
latest driver installed

Recently, on a number of occasions, I have found that without warning, my
screen goes blank, but the system keeps running. I cannot reboot, nor switch
off at the base unit level. The only solution is to pull out the power lead
and recconnect after a few seconds. the system then runs normally, until the
next time.

By trial and error, I have tracked this to Word. No other program, whether
Office or not, causes this failure. I have updated all my office products
from the MS website. I have automatic updates enabled.

This has become much worse recently and usually happens when I have a
document open rather than when Word is running in the background but
minimised.

This is an office machine and has no weird games type of software installed

Has anyone come accross this and, if so, can give me some help. This is
really getting to my productivity and I am hoping that this is not going to
mean a full and time consuming reinstall of Office.

With many thanks, in advance.

 

[Augustus]

By trial and error, I have tracked this to Word. No other program, whether

Office or not, causes this failure. I have updated all my office products
from the MS website. I have automatic updates enabled.

This has become much worse recently and usually happens when I have a
document open rather than when Word is running in the background but
minimised.

The probability that Word is causing this issue is pretty small. It's almost
certainly a hardware issue that's showing up under specific conditions when
Word happens to be running. You're running what's really an ancient system
with a newish video card. My primary suspect here would be the power supply.
When they get flaky with age ( and if this is an original ATX one that came
with the old PIII box it's marginal at best for an X700 Pro AGP) they do
this.