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Word 97 bug for Windows 98 users

The bug occurs in Word 97 running on a Windows 98 computer and involves the popular 'AutoCorrect' feature.

2 min read
A Microsoft Word 97 bug is causing problems for Windows 98 users.

The bug occurs in Word 97 running on a Windows 98 computer and involves the popular "AutoCorrect" feature. If a user attempts to save a document anytime after inserting a word or phrase into the text by double clicking on it from the "AutoText" tab in the AutoCorrect dialogue box, Word 97 will crash, and users will lose all unsaved data.

Microsoft posted information about the bug to its Web site on June 22, just three days before the official release of Windows 98, but has not yet posted a fix, according to Matthew Price, group product manager for Office.

"We posted a Knowledge Base Article, which explains it and provides the work around," said Price, who said that the bug was discovered somewhere in the beta testing process for Windows 98. "We identified it a couple of months ago, and we created a fix for it, which will be part of Service Release 2" for Office 97, due out in a couple of weeks, he said.

Although the problem does not occur in Windows 95, Microsoft says the problem is not a Windows 98 bug. "It's not that there's something in the operating system is causing it to go wrong, it's that [this Office bug] only shows up in Windows 98," explained Price.

Although technically not a Windows 98 code error, this is the latest Windows 98 problem to crop up. The operating system was assailed by owners of older computers who experienced problems in upgrading their systems from Windows 95, raising questions about whether the upgraded OS had undergone sufficient pre-release testing. Last week the first Windows 98 bug was discovered.

Because Word will only shut down when a word or phrase is inserted through double-clicking, Price says the work-around is simple: click on the selected text once, and then click the 'Insert' button. "There's a work around: You just don't double click," he said.