I've tried to help quite a lot of people on here recently so I'm hoping someone will return the favour! My friend has a problem with her laptop which I've tried to diagnose via text message but I can't think of anything other than "wipe it and start again". Maybe someone can come up with a better idea?

Here's what she said (copied word for word in case I'd mis-interpreted something):

"......everytime i try & open a document a green line comes across the screen & then it crashs / a message sayin-a fatal exception 0E has occured @ 0137:BFF8580B what should i do? a friend from uni said i should reinstal window"

At this point, I suggested that she re-installed Word. She came back with:

"I ve just tried to reinstall word & its come up with another message-A fatal exception 0E has occured @ 0028:C002B6FC in VXD VCACHE(01) + 00000070"

I believe that she's running Windows 98 and Word 97 but I've just asked her to confirm.

None of that really means much to me. Anyone else got any ideas?

VXD VCACHE errors are normally indicative of a RAM failure,
Make sure the RAM is seated properly first

If there is more than 1 RAM stick then, remove one and see if the errors occur, if they do, remove that first stick and replace with the second.

If the errors still occur then there is a remote possibililty that the motherboard has died

Oh dear - that won't make me too popular. It's my ex-girlfriend you see and I recommended that she bought that laptop second-hand just before we split up, lol !

Thanks a lot for your quick response