O
Orrie
RE: Word 2003 v. 11.6113.5703 (part of Office 2003 upgrade over Works 2002
on Win XP Pro computer)
Last night, I was working on a document in Word 2003, when suddenly, the
text turned to little ASCII-style boxes. The font was listed as Courier,
instead of the Times New Roman I had been using. An error message appeared
saying something about the .DOT file being damaged. I tried selecting the
entire document (Ctrl-A) and changing the font back to Times, but that
didn't restore the text.
I had been working on this .DOC all day, and had been saving my file often.
AutoSave was on. In addition, my backup routine automatically saves a copy
of my work to an external hard drive every five minutes if the file has
changed.
When I tried to look for my document in Explorer, the file had disappeared.
The only files related to it were a whole series of WRL backups. The most
recent ones were corrupted, too, but going back, I found one with the work
from about three hours earlier. I saved it with a new name in the
appropriate My Documents folder, then shut down and rebooted. Of course, I
am now stuck with having to reconstruct that last few hours of work that
went into the document.
I am not aware that I did anything to cause this. The computer had been on
all day, and several programs were running in addition to Word 2003,
including Groove, Windows Messenger, Outlook Express, Opera (browser) and
possibly some others. I usually work with these programs open, and have
never had a problem like this. My virus definitions are up to date, and my
computer checks out as virus-free.
Today, I opened the file I saved last night, and it seems fine. Word seems
to be working properly. There is still no sign of the original file I was
working on yesterday. It just vanished.
I'm nervous about this happening again. I didn't find anything in the
Microsoft Knowledge Base that refers to this. Can anyone figure out what
went wrong and what precautions I can take to prevent a recurrence?
Orrie
on Win XP Pro computer)
Last night, I was working on a document in Word 2003, when suddenly, the
text turned to little ASCII-style boxes. The font was listed as Courier,
instead of the Times New Roman I had been using. An error message appeared
saying something about the .DOT file being damaged. I tried selecting the
entire document (Ctrl-A) and changing the font back to Times, but that
didn't restore the text.
I had been working on this .DOC all day, and had been saving my file often.
AutoSave was on. In addition, my backup routine automatically saves a copy
of my work to an external hard drive every five minutes if the file has
changed.
When I tried to look for my document in Explorer, the file had disappeared.
The only files related to it were a whole series of WRL backups. The most
recent ones were corrupted, too, but going back, I found one with the work
from about three hours earlier. I saved it with a new name in the
appropriate My Documents folder, then shut down and rebooted. Of course, I
am now stuck with having to reconstruct that last few hours of work that
went into the document.
I am not aware that I did anything to cause this. The computer had been on
all day, and several programs were running in addition to Word 2003,
including Groove, Windows Messenger, Outlook Express, Opera (browser) and
possibly some others. I usually work with these programs open, and have
never had a problem like this. My virus definitions are up to date, and my
computer checks out as virus-free.
Today, I opened the file I saved last night, and it seems fine. Word seems
to be working properly. There is still no sign of the original file I was
working on yesterday. It just vanished.
I'm nervous about this happening again. I didn't find anything in the
Microsoft Knowledge Base that refers to this. Can anyone figure out what
went wrong and what precautions I can take to prevent a recurrence?
Orrie