Word only "pretends" to save

[Laura]

I've been working with Word for over 15 years and never saw this until
recently 3 unrelated people -- myself included -- have reported this
happening to them in Word 2003:

They edit a document and choose SAVE.
Word acts like it saved, but when they open the document the changes are not
there. You can even save the file with a new name and the new file is there
-- but without the changes.

I spent 2 hours trying to save a file the other night. In my case it was a
template. I did save as with new names. I saved it to new locations. The
files would be created - but they did not include the changes. Or they
included partial changes.

Finally I emailed the template to a different computer, made the changes,
and saved no problem.

Has anyone seen this happen? It was maddening and not a good thing when
clients open their document and their changes are not there.

These computers have word add-in programs but they are different -- no
specific "common thread" amongst them.

It seems very bizarre to me that I've never seen this happen for years
knowing hundreds of Word users and then in the span of 2 weeks I hear of it
happening on three unrelated computers.

TIA.

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

How "unrelated" are the computers. Have you checked for viruses?

If you're sure you're virus free, the standard drill is to try starting Word
in safe mode. Hold down Ctrl while starting Word, and click Yes to starting
in Safe mode. Can you now save correctly?

If starting in safe mode temporarily "solves" the problem, the permanent
cure usually is one of these (sometimes both):

1. Try renaming Normal.dot.

2. Try deleting or renaming the Data key in the registry.

In Word 2003, the Data key is here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word

 

[Laura]

They are unrelated in that they are at 3 different companies all running
different software. All 3 companies do have a doucment management system,
which I suspected initially, but the third company is using a different DMS
than the first two.

ALso, at all 3 companies there are anywhere from 10 to 100 comptuers running
their configuration successfully.

I did delete the normal.dot (will have to check w/ user to see if that
solved it).

I will suggest the data key removal next and I've also have read to delete
word temp files.

I was just really blown away that all these years I have never clicked save
and had it "pretend" to save. And now 3 times in a week. I have received
"disk full" errors when the disk clearly was not full and rebooting helped
that. But never done a save as, ended up with a NEW DOCUMENT looked in it
and had the changes not be there.

OH, on one comptuer it was Word 2007 too, I was thinking it was all 2003 but
that was wrong.