[jmichae3]

strange problem in Word 97. Word stays minimized no matter what I try with it, it tries to open and then mimimizes. the window never entirely draws, but I can see the outline of

something maximizing and shrinking back down.

Excel is fine. just Word is affected.
when I tried to repair the Word installation, it gave several errors, one of which was "could not unregister .SRG". sure enough, there were SRG registry entries.

I tried a remove (got many errors I had to ignore about "unable to remove folder XXXX.EXE". I thought an EXE was sure a funny name for a folder; and other file types that

ran by).
At least I think it gave errors. when it was all done, I deleted the Microsoft Office directory (which takes care of Normal.DOT). nothing in there but templates that could be

tossed.
then I reinstalled.

I still have the same problem.
------------------------------

I am thinking I need a registry hack. All I know is any reg entry with SRG in it belongs to microsoft office and could be removed the next time I do a reinstall. remove any

related GUIDs and typelibs. that could take a while.

this is my mother's win98 machine. it is not going to get an upgrade, so no upgrade comments.

[did a scan of a copy of the hard disk using latest mcafee, no vermin found. am scanning with webroot spysweeper which will probably produce nothing.]

[Pierre14]

You still use office 97?? Use open office its better And its free!!!! just like ms word 97 but more better

[bchalloner]

jmichae3,
Sounds like a more technical issue than I'm aware of. No good redoing normal.dot as the screen mimimised is not setup here but in other parts of Word.
A good starting point for you to look is word.mvps.org which is the Word guru site other than Microsoft. Try the search facility at the top of your page and try "minimized' as a search.
I remember back in the dim days of Word 97 (I now use Word 2007) this problem arising. If there is no help here, try a google search. This can help you track down your answer.
Sorry I can't be more specific and give you a direct answer.
Regards
Bruce

[bchalloner]

try this link. It may help.
http://wordtips.vitalnews.com/Pages/...rd_Window.html

[jmichae3]

registry hack. apparently the window settings were corrupted:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/264299

[jmichae3]

tried open office 2.31 for serious stuff.
mail merge is still broken. field editor is broken (doesn't allow spaces, can't delete fields in the list), and the address list creator puts spaces in the field names...
still use it on my win2k box for basic stuff though.
office 2003 & 2007 do not run on windows 98.