Hi, all. Please pardon my barging.

I'm currently running Word 6.0 on my iBook, running 9.1. (It's got OSX
loaded but I don't want to change OSes at this point.) Word and I have
reached a certain equilibrium over the years, but now it's upset--I'm on a
project that's going to require me to download tons of people's Word
files, mostly from Windows machines, as attachments, and it just won't do
it. I get the dread "unexpectedly quit" from the app after opening such a
file, whether it's from within the application or off the desktop.

I've got the converter extension installed. I've checked for corrupted
fonts. I've checked for corrupted templates. I've trashed my old
preferences. I've doubled the memory. I haven't yet tried chicken soup,
but I'm beginning to think it wouldn't hurt.

At work, I'm running 6.0 as well, on a G4 running 9.2. If I take one of
the problem files on disk (eliminating the possibility of the download
itself being the problem) to work it opens up just fine.

For extra information, I took one of the problem documents and did a Save
As both in Word 6 and in Word 5.1 from work. They both open up at home
just fine. What's interesting, though, is that the resaved Word 6 version
is only 11K; the initial download was 24K. I also notice that the
indications of the "keep lines together" in Paragraph are no longer
displayed in the resaved version. There may be other differences as well,
but that's the one I noticed.

Is that enough of a clue to elicit a suggestion of something else to try?
Hope so, as I've got 400 documents incoming in the next few months.
Thanks for any help you can offer.

Deborah Stevenson
(stevenso@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)