Posts by MidiMagic

Here is what I did:

• The URL in the post above contains strikethroughs added by Daniweb.
• I copied the URL to Notepad to remove everything but the pure URL (including the strikethroughs).
• The repaired URL worked. I was able to read the KB article. Only the link in Daniweb won't work.
• I got the path string from the shortcut to word.
• I tried both the command line and the new shortcut methods listed in the KB article..

• Was I supposed to get the dialog box in this link? http://i.imgur.com/bJhU4uV.png I did not get it.

• I got the same results I got before:

  1. Using either Save or Save As to the My computer folder on the C: drive caused no problems.
  2. Using Save As to the E: drive caused no problems.
  3. Using Save to the E: drive caused the computer to crash.
  4. The first test that crashed the computer caused the Acvtive Desktop problem.
  5. The second test that crtashede the computer did not do this.

• Each crash leaves a .tmp file on the drive used. Examples are ^WRD0000.tmp and ^WRD0001.tmp.

• If the .tmp file is left in place, Word gives the option of recovering the file. It works.
• Word works normally except for the Save option.

I did not do any other tests because I lose the computer for half an hour each time it crashes (because Chkdsk runs before Windows starts) and because each crash deprives other users the files on the H: drive.

You told me to google to find out how to start safe mode, and that was what I found.

I did not get the dialog box shown in your image, so I guess safe mode was not on. But if I had gotten that box, I would not have thought to mention it in the posts.

I tried your link and got this:

"Broken Link
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/210565
You're trying to visit a URL that doesn't currently exist on the web. Most likely, a member posted a link a long time ago to a web page that has since been removed. It's also possible that there was a typo when posting the URL. We redirect you to this notice instead of stripping out the link to preserve the integrity of the post."

Selfish Microsoift has removed all of the KB material for Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

I tried the command line WNWORD /A in the original attempts to run in safe mode and it returned "command not found". Don't I have to put in the complete path? But the command line won't take a path with lower case letters in it.

Can I add the switch to the Winword command line of a duplicate shortcut that starts Word?

I also need to know which command line to use. I found 2 different command lines online that are different from yours. Is the switch /A . /S , or /SAFE ?

My other question was not just about uninstalling and reinstalling Word.
My question was if it would help to uninstall and reinstall all of Office instead of just Word.

What is this "deep cleaning" you are talking about. Is it removing all of the Word registry entries?

One other possible clue: I had just removed some Office components two days before because I was running out of disk space on drive C and I didn't use them on this computer. I uninstalled all of the following:
OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath, and SharePoint.

I used the following procedure:

Click on “Start,” then select “All Programs” and “Microsoft Office.”
Press and hold down “Ctrl,” and then select “Microsoft Word.”
Create or open the file to be tested.
Save As a copy of this file to the drive to be tested. I chose different folders.
Make a small change in the file and use Save.

Drive C is an NTFS hard disk. Windows is on this disk.
Drive E is a USB FAT flash drive.
Drive H is a USB FAT flash drive mounted inside the computer and configured as a network drive.

Chkdsk has not found any faults in these drives.

I found the trouble with the desktop. Something had changed a setting in the Active Desktop, enabling a function I did not want, but not activiating the Active Desktop.

Save crashed whenever I saved to drive E or drive H with safe mode on.

Can removing all of Office (instead of just Word) and reinstalling it fix this?

Virus checker scans have repeatedly found no malware other than an incomlete file in the virus checker (the download and installation of this file was interrupted by one of the crashes). Downloading the file again fixed this.

I scanned for registry errors. It found and fixed a few. But none of them were related to Word and it didn't fix the problem.

I still need an answer.

I set Word to require signed certificates on all add-ins. This removed 3 of the add-ins. But it did not fix the problem.

Should I remove all of the add-ins?

Are there other items that are somehoiw added to Word that could cause this?

Will removing all of Office and reinstalling it fix this?

@ rproffitt 224, I misunderstood what you wrote. I thought you meant you didn't want any more XP problems on Daniweb.

I am running XP because I have legacy external hardware. No versions of this kind of hardware have been manufactured that can work with newer versions of Windows. So stop complaining that I am still running XP.

I tried the safe mode and at first thought it had worked. But I then found out the following:
- Save As always works on all drives with or without safe mode on.
- Save worked OK when I saved to My Computer whether or not safe mode was on.
- Save crashed whenever I saved to drive E or drive H whether or not safe mode was on.
- Sometimes the crashes made the computer forget the desktop settings when it rebooted.
- Normally rebooting the computer does not make it forget the desktop display settings.
- Drive E and drive H are FAT flash drives. Drive C is an NTFS hard disk.
- Excel Save and Save As worked OK to all drives.
- Drive H is shared with a computer with Office 2010. Word 2010 Save and Save As work OK to drive H.
- Drive H is physically located in the computer with the trouble and configured as a network drive.
- Notepad works OK with Save and Save As on all drives.
- Ejecting drive E and reinserting it made no difference.
- Shutting down the computer and restarting it after a minute rest made no …

I even reinstalled Word after removing it. It still does this.

I have all of my install disks and product keys.

Here is the order of what happened. Some of it seems weird:

1. I downloaded a web page with Firefox Save Page As. The site should be trustwoirthy (a local newspaper).
2. I edited the HTML file with Notepad to remove everything (ads, scripts, etc) from the page except the text I wanted to keep. I saved it as a .txt file.
3. I opened the .txt file and fomatted it with Word 2007. I then saved it with Save As as a .docs file.
4. I then made a small change (adding the date at the bottom) and hit the save button on the Quick Access toolbar. A blue screen error message appeared, and then the computer immediately rebooted. There was not time to read the message, other than that Windows detected the error and closed to protect the computer.
5. The reboot did a Chkdsk on the drive I saved the file to. It found no problems with the disk.
6. I found a .tmp file in the folder the file was saved to.
7. The file was intact, but the changes I made were gone.

Now, every time I use Save from Word (either from the Office button or the Quick Access toolbar), the same thing happens. It does not matter which drive I save the file to Chldsk checks the disk I saved the file to. But the Save As function works normally, as does the rest of Word..

I used my original Office install disk to repair the installation. It did …

For those who find this, Windows 7 requires a USB microphone. I replaced the headset and everything works.

It took a while to find the answer. Birds had gotten into the splce box for the telephone lines next to the telephone pole and built a nest using the wires in the box. Every time it rained, I was getting DSL errors. These affected some servers more than others.

I just now found this topic again and decided to tell what happened.

I now know where that font went. It was included with Office 2003. When I replaced the hard disk, I installed Office 2010. I copied the Firefox settings from the old installation so I would not lose my bookmarks. But the font was not included with Office 2010.

I got it going! But it was 3 days of work.

1. Since Windows Explorer's file manager was still working, I was able to back up all of the data files to an external hard disk he had. That consumed day 1.

2. I tried a registry repair app. It said the registry was unintelligible, and that it could not fix it.

3. I reinstalled Windows XP from his original disk. When it finished, XP was unable to do most things. It was unable to download either Firefox or the antivirus software, and IE was unable to look at most websites. The Microsoft site used to obtain Service Packs 1, 2, and 3 had been taken down by Microsoft. Microsoft has a new site, but it requires Service Pack 2 to already be installed to use it. Tell me this isn't a trick to try to get rid of XP! Thus ended day 2.

4. I have a set of CD-ROMs containing Service Packs 1, 2, and 3, so I took them over to my brother's computer. I spent most of Day 3 installing those, the antivirus software, and Firefox. I also installed his copy of Office 2000 and got his email working.

Then my brother was able to read an email from his friend who sent the file that caused the problem. There was a typo in the extension of an image file included in a compressed folder. The decompressing program ran the file as a registry restore and smashed the registry …

Text-align does not normally affect an image. I could leave it out except that some versions of IE don't work without it. IE will center the image with just the test align. Other browsers will not. What I used wo5rks with all browsers.

I have been centering images like this for years:

CSS:

.cenx {text-align: center;}
.ceni {clear: both;}
.bxfix {margin: 0; border: none; padding: 0;}

HTML:

<div class="bxfix cenx"
  <img src="imgfile.png" alt="Mine" class="ceni" />
</div>

The style .cenx makes it work with older IE.

I get little white rectangles when I paste the copied text. My editor can't accept the Cyrillic characters.

How do I run this Doug Knox fix if the computer can't download anything or run any programs?

My entire site is xhtml 1.0 strict as required by the webmaster for uniformity. It is the price I gladly pay for free hosting with unlimited storage.

I am still converting some of my old pages (not currently up) from html 4.0 (from when I had Geocities) to xhtml 1.0 so I can put them up (but doing it at my leisure, as new pages have my priority).

My native language is English. I do not have the ablity to type in the character directly because I do not speak or write Russian. I put this one word in to explain a connection between the Bible and a historic event.

Actually the Tandy Color Computer 3 and the Tandy 3000 were closer to what I have in mind. Both have operating systems in ROM. The Color Computer 3 was the first home computer able to run a form of UNIX (called OS-9). And the Tandy 3000 ran MS-DOS 6.1. It could run Windows 3.1 from a floppy disk. Neither had a hard disk. The C: drive was a ROM.

When you are doing scientific research, NO change in the operating system is permitted without having to do an extensive check to make sure the change is benign to your research software (especially if any kind of real-time operation is being controlled by the software). I don't know how many times we found out that a seemingly innocuous change made by Microsoft changed the system timing enough to make the research software malfunction, damaging the experiment.

I am totally sick of the pace of change forced on us by Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers. Nobody can possibly do a valid 10 year study now, let alone a 20-year study. Does Microsoft need that extra money that much??? Or are they taking us back to the early days of IBM renting software to mainframe owners?

It won't start the web browser or run any .exe files. And the desktop icons do the same thing.

It does allow entering the File Types, and all of the file types appear correct. Has the registry been damaged so all of the various file types do the same thing? Or is this some kind of a fake shell that has replaced Windows Explorer?

It only does these things on Daniweb. Otherwise these keys behave normally.

End takes me to the right end of the line (not the paragraph) everywhere else in the web universe. Except for today, End always takes me to the beginning of the paragraph in Daniweb. So, of course, today, it takes me to the end of the paragraph (not the line, as it should) when I try it here. Home is taking me to the beginning of the paragraph (not the line, as it should) right now.

Home and End are supposed to move you horizontally, but not move you up or down. In the paragraph above, it moves you ip to the beginning of the paragraph oir down to the end. That is wrong.

Does the fact that I am still using Windows XP have anything to do with this?

Backspace is behaving today.

Several keyboard keys in Daniweb are doing the wrong things.

• Occasionally backspace is taking me back to previous pages instead of removing characters.

• The END key takes me to the beginning of the line instead of the end of the line.

• I occasionally find myself navigating where I didn't want to go, and have no idea what key did that.

Editing keys should be STANDARD, always doing the same things on all web pages in the universe..

Please, no hot keys.

My brother has Windows XP with a large number of art programs that don't work in newer versions of Windows.

Last thrusday, he got a an art file from a colleague with a .rar extension. He downloaded WinZip to open it. It would not open the art file.

Now the computer does not recognize any file type. Double-clicking any icon on the desktop or in windows explorer (My Computer) opens a dialog box saying the computer was unable to recognize the file type. The only suggested programs the dialog box suggests are Windows Picture and Fax Viewer and Notepad.

The File Types part of Folder Options in windows explorer shows the correct path to the application. But actually going to that application on the C drive and double clicking it gives the same dialog box.

What caused this and how can it be reversed?

I found a way to stop it. But if I publish it, then Microsoft will find a way around it.

Microsoft does not seem to care that every upgrade it makes causes the real-time hardware people need to quit working.

It's time to ban upgrades. Operating systems and software should not be constantly changing. There should be a law.

My idea of the ideal computer has the operating system in ROM so it can't be changed or upgraded.

I am using the doctype for xhtml. Does that make a difference?

Yes, I am using utf-8.

As an example, it did not recognize the character entity & YAcy; (the backward R) as valid.
It does recongize & #1071; (same character) as valid.
(I inserted a space after the & here to prevent encoding.)

Every browser I tried accepted & YAcy; and displayed the correct character.

I wrote a web page with one Russian word in it, using the Cyrillic alphabet character entity names (found in a list of all Unicode characters that I have). The page works fine in every browser I tried. But the W3C validator won't validate the page because the Cyrillic character entity names were used. It validates if I use the Unicode numbers instead, but that is such clanky programming. It reminds me of having to type in the ASCII code for every character the program displays in assembly language programming.

Why can't we have the better programming practices? W3C seems to want to deprecate all but 5 of the character entity names. This sounds like going back to the stone age.

I found the trouble.

The font I originally selected in Firefox Options for displaying monospace has somehow disappeared from my computer. I selected a different font and it is now working.

I am now wondering what happened to that font.

I made the following css:

.mo {font-family: monospace; font-size: 9pt;}
td {border: solid thin #000000; padding: 4pt;}

With the following html (part of a table)

<td class="mo">abcdefg
 <br />hijklmn</td>

The text is not displaying in a monospaced font in Firefox. The i is narrower and the m is wider. The table cell width is not a constraining factor as the cell above it has wider content. The displayed font looks like Arial.

It displays correctly in IE.

Why

As much as I hate the hover feature, it seems to be working the way you said you wanted it to in Firefox. Have you tried looking at it in several different browsers?

The problem is probably in the stylesheet, which you did not show us. Have you made the mistake of combining the following attributes in the same class or placing their classes in the same tag?

• width or height attributes
• margins, borders, or paddings
• Absolute object locations

Internet Explorer makes a mess when this happens. It interprets these inside out from how the standard defines them.

I also do not see html tags or a doctype declaration. If both are missing, the browser will go into quirks mode.

There is only one way to keep sensitive data safe from hacking: Never connect computers containing sensitive data to the Internet.

Is the folder localhost on your website server, or on your PC.

The server does not have access to your PC.

Is it too big to fit on the screen?

HTML for Dummies

Please do NOT use hover devices.

They are extremely annoying when the user is trying to do something else and the hover opens something that covers what the user wanted.

They are NOT accessible. People with lexical or sensory-visual disorders think they have done something wrong when the hover device activates. Also, some people with lexical difficulties use the mouse to follow what they are reading. A hover disrupts this. Hovers should be illegal.

If you must use these abominable devices, don't fill an entire horizontal line with hover devices. The mouse on a device that is not a cellphone cannot cross the line of hovers without activating one. There is one state government page I can't access without a cellphone because the hover to get the menu I want is above another line of hovers. When I cross the second line of hovers, it changes the menu below away from the menu I want. I can never get to the link to the page I want.

The problem is that you are expecting all of the parts to stay in lock step over the background. HTML, even with CSS, is not designed to do this. Viewing the page on a different screen resolution will make it fall apart.

Instead of trying to make everything fit a fixed background, use a simple background and make all of the essential parts of the page foreground elements:

• Make a separate item for your title. Center it at the top.

• Place the items in the order you want them in.

• DO NOT expect things to be fixed size. Different screen resolutions will cause totally different sizes to the various elements, depending on hiw they fit.

• Don't make elements so big (in pixel count) that they will not fit on a smaller screen. Use 1024 X 768 as your largest pixel count for an image (it will completely fill the screen of an older computer). But some phones are only 640 X 480, so keep this in mind.

• Most browsers have a setting of what to do with an oversize image. Some are set to shrink the image to fit, others display only part of the image at a time. Design your page to wortk with either setting.

• Don't expect an element to stay at the very bottom of the screen. There are ways to put something at the bottom, but they do not work on all computers.

I had this on a laptop years ago, and the battery connector was loose.

Every software supplier that drops XP compatibility is keeping the poor from using their software. We had a company here donate hundreds of XP PCs to a local secondhand store.

Find out what this client is running. He might be using OpenOffice.

Did you install the Office 97-2003 compatibility pasckage when you installed 2007? If not, the file format is foreign to 2007.

How did you just now get Office 2007? We can't get anything but 2103 here.

Google maps is not running on XP correctly on my machine because it often demands more free RAM than I have at the time. So it freezes. I found out that I can't use it while the antivirus is scanning and several other processes are open. Unfortunately, I usually want it to get information for one of those other processes.

Unfortunately, my motherboard is fully populated with RAM. Part of the problem is that they keep making programs bigger and bigger. Last year Firefox used 64 MB of RAM. Right now, it is using 780 MB.

Google Maps just stopped working correctly in XP today. They are now forcing people to use their new format. It requires 7 as a minimum.

There is a store here that refurbishes old computers for the poor. They put XP on them because it is the only OS that fits and works in the available RAM.

If companies keep making software stop working in XP to please Microsoft, the people who got these computers are going to have useless equipment.

>>We should be able to run anything we have. Get rid of the stupid idea that people don't need old files and software.

>You can. Just keep your old computer with your copy of DOS 1.0 or CP/M, or possibly AmigaDOS or whatever. I don't see you ragging on Gary KilDall or Commodore because those systems are no longer supported.

So what do I do when that computer dies, cannot be fixed (because parts are no longer available) and can't be replaced with a new one? Those programs and devices do not work in new computers, because they changed how the hardware in the new computers works.

>>I have copyrights those songs, but I no longer have the songs themselves in any form except recordings I made of them. And I'd bet that even the copyright office can't read those files now.

>You do know that sheet music is pretty much always readable. There are even programs that will do OCR on musical scores.

I did not print out the music at first because I had a daisy wheel printer. Then, when I got an ink jet printer, the ink was so expensive that I printed only one song (using half the cartridge). I have the files, but no printouts.

The problem is that, when this music was written, a special font of music notes of various values in various positions was used by the software. The "sheet music" file itself is a non-text text file. And I …

>>The spreadsheets were in the Lotus 123 .wks format.

>It's not Microsoft's fault that Lotus 123 used a non-portable format. It's certainly not up to Microsoft to continue supporting an old format that wasn't even theirs to begin with.

Because Microsoft supported it once, they should continue to supoport it. People's data do not magically disappear because Microsoft quietly stopped supporting them. And most people do not know that such support disappeared, and they still have 123 files.

>>The image files were in the .pcx format, which was deprecated by Microsoft

>The idea of designating something as deprecated is specifically to give people time to do the conversion while the supported tools are still available. If people choose to ignore the warning then that is their own fault.

Most people didn't get any warning.

>>The 7 image viewer won't display .gif animations.

>There are many programs that will display these files. AcdSee and FastStone Viewer for example. FastStone will also display pcx files. ACDSee will convert them.

XP image viewer does display the animation. The .gif animation format is still in use, so why did Microsoft stop displaying it?

>>You can't do pixel-by-pixel image creation in the 7 and later version of MSPaint. They turned it into a stupid artist-oriented program.

>Nobody would do serious work in MSPaint when there are excellent free apps like gimp available.

I use it for line drawings where I don't want any aliasing.

>>Some older music software requires Windows 3.1. …

Note that Microsoft has no way to tell the distribution copy of your OS is a copy or not. The product code is the only thing they really look at.

But MS may be rejecting ALL attempts to install old versions now, as a greedy trick to make you use the horrid Windows 8.

Antitrust Microsoft for its coersive policies.

The former employer who contacted me had no idea that their files were no longer readable. They are not computer-literate. Also, when I worked there, MS-DOS upgrades did not cause files to become unreadable. Upgrades to MS-DOS did not change the file structure or whether or not a particular version of swoftware would run (except DBase II, which used trickery to copy-protect files that made copy-protected files look like folders to MS-DOS 3.0). Much scientific research was lost because their MS-DOS files could no longer be read.

Until about 5 months ago, I had a working Windows 3.1 machine. I thought I could repair anything on it. But the battery leaked and ate the copper from the circuit board. I have a version of Lotus that would have worked on that computer, but it failed before they contacted me.

I had no way to convert my music files to a more modern machine before the computer died, because the files were in a proprietary format. I have the files on floppy disks, but no software to read the contents.

I have actually started Windows 3.1 on an XP machine, but I can't run the software because the only kind of disk that works on both XP and Win 3.1 is a 1.44 MB floppy. I can't fit Win 3.1, the music program, and a song file onto the same disk at the same time. Win 3.1 doesn't know how to read a new CD-ROM, a new hard disk, or a …

But we didn't NEED the last three generations. Microsoft forced them on people to MAKE TONS OF MONEY at everyone else's expense.

Here is some more fallout from this mad upgrade rush:

Old files archieved from years ago can no longer be read.

I was recently asked to look up some old files for a former employer, saved in the 1980s and 1990s. neither I nor the employer had any computers that could read the files:

• The spreadsheets were in the Lotus 123 .wks format. The last time I looked, Microsoft Excel could read them, so nobody worried about them. But the last version of Office that could read them was Office 97. Trying to reconstruct them with the "foreign spreadsheet reconstructor" in Excel produces cells full of gibberish.

• The image files were in the .pcx format, which was deprecated by Microsoft after for a while requiring it to upload an image to an Internet server.

• The DBaseII database files were converted by Windows into huge nests of folders. Each folder had the content of one data item with a changed first character as its name. And the one-computer-only-product key would not work to start the program.

• Wordstar files were smashed into unreadable clutters of special characters.

• The lab data files were text files intended to be written and read by a GWBASIC program. The files could easily be read as text, but to understand what the data meant, we needed the program. We had the program file, but nothing …

More fallout from Microsoft's trickery to make us change to 10.

I can't find any new printers that work with XP, and Lexmark just discontinued the ink for my printer. Cheat Cheat Cheat.

How do the Linux users find printers they can use?

You mean "balls of steal".

Now Microsoft is trying to switch their software over to rental on a yearly basis, instead of purchase.

I was just looking over my life, and 90 percent of my life's achievements are now totally useless, because we have to keep upgrading computers to please Microsoft. Here is a partial list of what has been lost, because the computers and equipment are no longer available:

• Computer art creator for IBM 1130
• Disassembler for TI-980 computer
• Very early music playing program for a 6800 computer
• Star Trek game for TI 56
• Computer Poetry for CDC-6600
• MadLibs program for CDC 6600
• Graphing antique record recording curves for CDC-6600
• Quadraphonoc matrix system evaluation for CDC-6600
• 24 computer terminal multiplexer for one phone line, 6809
• Baudot code printer interface for an Apple IIe
• 6 video games for Color Logo
• Over 30 song compositions on Color Music Lab
• PID controller for 6809 computer
• Mandelbrot set explorer for 6809 computer
• Simulation of formation of a spiral galaxy, 6809 computer
• Artifact Color Screen printer for Tandy Color Computer
• MadLibs program for Tandy Color Computer
• Computer oscilloscope for Tandy Color Computer
• Talking computer for Tandy Color Computer
• Phonograph tonearm tracking error calculator, 6809 computer
• Artifact-color screen printer for Tandy Color Computer
• EMACS Text Editor for Tandy Color Computer
• Radio Ball pinball game* *
• Inventory system for chemistry lab, MS-DOS
• Economics tracker and predictor, MS-DOS
• Traffic signal progression calculator, MS-DOS
• Video game for children's math facts practice, MS-DOS
• Phonograph Record inventory, Lotus 123
• Appointment tracking system, DBase III
• Experiment control for X-ray crystalography, PDP 11
• Experiment control for ICP Spectrometry, MS-DOS and PDP 8
• Experiment control for …

Robert...you're joking right? Gee, I didn't know MS stopped updating XP. I guess I should have stated in my post...."MS pulled the plug on XP".

MS has now pulled the plug on everything but 10, effective 4/1/2015. The new CEO is GREEDY!