~If you don't have an anti-virus program, test drive one of many programs available on a 30-day trial. Purchase a program that offers an automatic scheduler feature and set system to update files once a week.

~The most popular anti-virus programs are McAfee and Norton, however there are many other programs available*. http://www.mcafee.com http://www.norton.com http://www.sophos.com http://www.grisoft.com http://www.antivirus.com http://www.alwil.com/en/default.asp http://www.escorcher.com/

~Costco, Sam's Club, Office Depot, Office Max, Staples, etc. carry one or both these programs and they all have online stores, too. Or try an online comparison store like mysimon.com, pricegraber.com, amazon.com

~Add "yearly update of my anti-virus program" to your business or personal budget.

~Put aside 30 minutes to read directions of your new anti-virus program so that you know everything it can do. If you're updating, "read me" text file usually contains what's been updated or added since last version.

~Know, that if you have email programs other than Microsoft, you can still end up with a virus. Anti-virus programs are designed to destroy files and cause fear. Viruses have been targeted at Adobe PDF, ICQ and other Microsoft files!

~Microsoft provides updates to programs on their website. Security updates may include fixes for a virus and are called critical files. Visit sites below once a month to update all critical files. MS Main Program Updates http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ MS Office Updates http://office.microsoft.com/productupdates/

~When you use them properly, anti-virus programs work! However remember that they are reactive not proactive. Whenever you hear about a new virus, update your data files immediately.

Now, lets say Word works fine most of time but in one particular document, every time you try to print or browse past a certain point, Word locks up or crashes. This is an indicator that there may be corruption within one of paragraph markers or in final paragraph marker of document. To display your paragraph markers, look for icon on your Standard toolbar that looks like a paragraph marker (or a backwards P) and click on it. This will show paragraph markers at end of each paragraph or wherever you hit Enter key to drop down a line. Highlight paragraph marker at end of whatever paragraph you suspect to be corrupt and delete it. This will remove any special paragraph formatting that was applied to that paragraph and remove corruption with it. If your entire document appears to be corrupt (fonts are all screwy or graphics are displaying strangely or it is giving you sporadic error messages), best way to try to save data is to highlight all of document EXCEPT final paragraph marker and copy it and paste it into a new blank document. A large percentage of document corruption is stored in final paragraph marker in a document and sometimes just putting it into a new document and leaving that paragraph marker behind fixes it.

Of course, there are rare occasions where none of these fixes actually fix your problem, so you may have to uninstall and reinstall Word. If you have Word 2000, you can go to Help menu and run Detect and Repair and this will fix many problems. If you can't get into Word at all, you can go to your Windows Control Panel and double-click on Add/Remove Programs and double-click on Microsoft Office in this list and you will see an option to repair Office. Both of these require Office CD to complete. However, if this still doesn't cure your problem or if you are using Word 97, which does not have Detect and Repair, you will have to uninstall and reinstall. Notice that I said to uninstall first because problems of this severity are rarely fixed by simply reinstalling application over top of itself. And, another thing to know about Microsoft Office programs is that uninstalling them does not completely remove them from your system, so if part of program that was causing problem has not been removed by uninstalling, it will still exist after reinstalling. To avoid this, Microsoft offers free downloadable Eraser Utilities to completely remove Office from your computer. I highly recommend you run proper eraser after you uninstall and before you reinstall in order to guarantee a clean install. There are links to Eraser utilities for both Office 97 and Office 2000 at my Office page: http://www.personal-computer-tutor.com/office.htm

I hope this helps you with your troubleshooting needs. Though Word is a great program, when it's bad, it's very, very bad.