Hi, Hopefully someone out there can help me.

I may have a couple of problems, that are all related. On Friday, I received an e-mail from someone I know and opened the attachment (a word document). It opened up as per usual - no problems at all! Later in the evening went back into outlook and opened the e-mail again, then the attachment, which I could not open, basically my PC locked for some time, then I got a warning "insufficient resource to complete this application" (or something like that!). Re booted - started again, same response, then I decide to look at another word document saved on my hard drive - same response and I've not been able to open a word document since.

Strangely Excel works, documents open and save etc.

Not that I know very much about the technical side of PC's, but I've run my maintenance wizard, but that appears to be stuck in a loop, which suggests I have a problem.

I have got 128 MB of RAM on my PC, 58% is Free. I'm running Windows 98 with office 2000 package.

I've looked at a couple of Free System Scans that are advertised on your website (Doctorbug etc) and they suggest I have lots of problems - are they worth the money?? I don't want to spend $50 unnecessarily, I'd rather given DAL something for this service because it helped me out last year too if there is an easy fix to this.

Can anyone help? Was the the document I opened infected with a virus?

Your help is much appreciated.

Thanks

Steve

im just wonderin, but what all firewalls do you have running? What was the file extension? Was it a .doc, or a .exe? Just wondering, this won't help any, im just wondering.

Hello and Welcome to DAL.

Word documents can contain macros, which can be used to induce a virus and other malware.

Not to lecture but, never open a word document within the mail utility. I receive a good number myself, from people I know well, but I always SAVE AS xxxxxxxxx.doc to the desktop. I then scan the saved document with my AV utility before I open it. I don't care who it's from or how well I know them or if they've scanned it before sending it. It could always be a forwarded "Hey, check this out! Pretty neat!" kind of affair. Some of this malware is pretty sneaky.

With 128 MB of RAM, (should be plenty unless you're tinkering with virtual memory settings) depending on what you have running (on startup and in the back ground), how big the document/attachment is, plus having Outlook open, you can run low or out of resources to work with. However, given that it worked the first time, and not afterward, I'd suspect something fishy. This coupled with "... maintenance wizard, but that appears to be stuck in a loop..." doesn't look good.

Scan this attachment with your AV, then do a complete deep scan (overnight?) of your system with your AV, and any malware tools you may have. (Ad-Aware SE, Spybot - Search & Destroy, SpywareBlaster, CWShredder, etc. These are the four I use.) Ensure the associated file definitions for these are up to date.

If these (type) tools don't turn up anything, visit the HiJack/Spyware forum, read the "pre-post" posting(s) (what to get/run, how to run it and what/how to post it etc) and they'll help if you're affected. (This is not my realm, I leave this stuff to those guys.) ;>)

"I've looked at a couple of Free System Scans that are advertised on your website (Doctorbug etc) and they suggest I have lots of problems.."

(I didn't even know about these on this site. I guess I don't "get out" much. ;>) ) Were these problems described at all?

Post back with any progress or questions.

Perhaps the files are damaged. Open word, click file>open, in the types of file box change it to Recover Text From Any File & navigate to the file & try to open it. If the file opens you may get a lot of diverse symbols, delete them & you may be able to recover some of the document.
If this still doesn't work, I think you can try a utility called Advanced Word Repair to repair your Word document. It works rather well for my corrupt Word documents.

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