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General discussion

Word 97 says document being used by another user?

Mar 28, 2005 9:09AM PST

When I try to open a Word document I get an error message that says "<Path & Filename> are being used by <username>. Do you want to make a copy?

It says this even if I just finished creating the document and saving it...then closing it and opening it again...I get this message.

Discussion is locked

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This is a well known issue when Word 97 is run on XP.
Mar 28, 2005 9:35AM PST

No fix is planned.

I'll share what I use that is very XP compatible. http://www.openoffice.org

In closing, there are other bugs when running Office 97 on XP. And again, there are no plans to fix them.

Bob

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This is correctable, but...
Jan 31, 2011 7:27AM PST

I have fought this problem. In my case, it was related to the ramdisk and the setting of the TEMP and TMP environment variables and may have had something to do with network and sharing. No indications of low space on the ramdisk, no other messages. My problem started after I introduced my laptop to its first network (my home network). I'd already had ramdisk in place. In my trouble shooting, I backout the last change made, not providing my home network to the laptop, which didn't help. Right before I'd decided to reinstall Windows 7, I changed the temp and tmp environment values off the ramdisk back onto my hard drive. Clicked on a document 'in use'; Word 97 came right back with the document. Odd thing, in attempt to recreate the problem, I put the variables back to point to the ramdisk, and Word 97 still worked. Go figure.

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Odd.
Feb 1, 2011 2:07AM PST

The default setup of XP does not use a RAMDISK. If you have a customized OS then you have to deal with that too.
Bob