My Word 2003 App Disappeared!!

J

Joseph

Just had the strangest thing happen to me in 20+ years
of computing.

Office 2000 Current on all SP releases/patches.
Word 2003. Pentium 4 running XP Home. 1 GB RAM.

Took a break from working on a Word doc today
(closed the doc and then exited Word) for lunch.

After lunch, I started to resume working on my doc.
Started to click on 2003 desktop icon when
I realized it wasn't there. Say what? Where did it go?

Attempted to launch Word from > Start > Programs.
Word wasn't there.

Ran > Start > Search searching for "winword.exe".
No hit!! Word has disappeared. I did get a hit on
my "D" backup drive (I have a separate 60 GB hard
dedicated to quick & easy backup/restore.) but it
couldn't/wouldn't open.

It seems obvious that a virus has attacked me despite
the best efforts of Norton AV and Zone Alarm. This
incident seems focused on Word. It eliminated Word
in the 20-25 minutes I was away at lunch.

Performed a System Restore to three days ago. It
worked fine, but Word desktop icon didn't reappear.

Any ideas? I haven't reinstalled yet (kind of reluctant
to go through all that again w/o knowing more about
the "problem".) Norton scan reveal no viruses. It
seems so strange for a large app such as Word to
disappear.
 
J

Joseph

I should have added that clicking on icon for existing
Word documents opens them in WordPad.
 
J

Joseph

OK, I re-installed Word 2003 and all went well.
However, after rebooting and launching Word 2003,
got a "Microsoft Visual Basic" box with the
following message.

"Object doesn't support this property or method."
Clicking on Help box, Help indicated one more clue.
"(Error 438)"

I'm a newbie. Don't know where to turn for
help with this VisualBasic problem that has
suddenly started appearing. Ran a completely
new installation. Can't imagine how a new install
picked up Avery Label macros, or the DataViz
Documents-to-Go macros installed a week ago
to sync with new Palm handheld. These all
worked well until today. Don't know where
to look. Tried deleting some of macros but
system reported all macros were disabled. If
that's case, where's the spurious code coming from?

Don't know anything about VBA, VBB, or XYZ.
Checked and I do have macros but they're all
disabled. I don't know where they came from...
especially after a clean install of Word.

Installed Word macros are:

Quickword (QWD) and DTX (Documents-to-Go)
are macros for creating/converting Word files
for use on Palm handheld. Never had problems
with them. Quit using QuickWord although it
still shows on top menu bar.

AddtoDXTGViaMenu
auto_close
auto_open
AutoExec
AutoExit
AveryWizard20
AveryWizardHelp20
CES_Save
CES-SaveAs
DeleteQuickwordMenu
DoAbout
DocToQWD
DocToQEDExt
DoHelp
DoOpen
OpenDocument
OpenDTXG
QWDtoDOC
QWDToDocExt
Read
SavedDocument
 
J

Joseph

After deleting/reinstalling Word 2003 because it disappeared
from my desktop yesterday, I find this on the MVPs web site at
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/customization/DataKeySettings.htm.

===========================================
"Deleting/Renaming the entire Data key or one of the values
is recommended if:


The Toolbars and Menu Bar are missing


Global preferences are not holding/updating. (Such as your
MRU list)


Word disappears from the Desktop"



===========================================

My timing is dismal as usual. Oh,well. Probably "cleaned" up
other potential problems by reinstalling.
 

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