Microsoft Office 2002 on Win98 problems

I am running Office 2002, and FrontPage 2002, on a Windows 98 computer. It has been giving me trouble. I had this huge problem with Word after I installed borders. The page was completely black. It would display ok for a split-second, then turn all black. I had to color my text white or light-colored to see it, then change it back to black to print. I finally jerked it into working again after uninstalling the borders and other stuff, and quite a few resets (warm boots, cold boots, power-outages, pulling plug in frustration:tas, and saving from freezes with both the Office tool and my own tries.)

Now just recently, the problem is that when I'm working in Excel for a long period, the machine just freezes. If music is playing in the background, it stops. The mouse pointer disappears. Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't even bring up any dialog. There is no Blue Screen of Death. I end up always pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete twice to restart, then Windows freezes on the restart with a blank screen before the start-up logo has a chance to be displayed. At this point, a keyboard reset doesn't work. I then have to switch it off and turn it back on (after a few minutes to let it settle down). Then I restart it, choose not to start in safe mode (as it says I can't fix drivers there anyway.) Then I get a message that my video adapter and monitor have problems, so I check the settings, change the screen resolution from 640x480x16 to 800x600x256 or higher, and restart the third time. I have had to do this most days I work with Excel, (At least the days I use the Microsoft Office Media CD-ROM. But I don't know for sure that's the problem, It's only been a week or so, and I didn't know I still had it in the drive until a couple days ago, then had to use it again today.) Do you think I have anything to worry about (other than making sure my docs are saved,) or is this some serious problem?

 

Although I've not come across your problem before (I only use Office 2000 on my Win98SE system) I would suggest that you uninstall Office, reboot and then try a reinstall as you may have a corrupt file in the Office suite. :banghead

 

Would I have problems with that activation thing? I had to activate it by registering that code and I don't think I can activate it again if something goes wrong. How is that supposed to work anyway?

 

I don't like to give advice on Win98 systems as mine was always crashing. There are some Office gurus that post during the day so you may want to wait for them. You could check to see if Office 2002 has the Detect and Repair option under the Help tab. I've had good luck using it in Office 2003.

 

That Detect and Repair thing was the first thing I tried, for the black-out problem. I don't think I tried it for this new one.

Also, I forgot to mention that the Office Assistant (no matter which one I choose) shows up in inverted colors at first until I click on it. If I don't click it, it stays in inverted colors even after I close all Office programs. (It goes off screen still with the problem.)