For some weeks now when using Windows 95 & MS Word 97 I am having a window pop up stating: ‘Registry Problem. Windows encountered an error in the system registry. Please close your programs and restart Windows now. You may lose some of the information from the current session. Restarting will allow the registry to reinitialize.” I follow the instructions and sure enough in no time fast… I have the same problem and down pops the window again. Needless to say this is very frustrating. Can please help me?

The first thing to do is check that the problem doesn’t just occur in one document. If it does, then that document is probably corrupted, but if it happens in all documents then it may be a problem with a data registry key in the Windows System Registry. To see if it is a problem, start Word using the /a key. This key tells Word to only load the bare essentials to run. To do this go to Start menu > Run, click browse and find the ‘winword.exe’ file and double click it. The path to it should appear in the ‘Open’ text field and at the end of the filename add ‘/a’ (without the quotation marks) (eg. c:program filesmicrosoft wordwinword.exe /a). This will open Word without the registry data keys. In any event, I suggest you reinstall Word because this will overwrite all of the old Word program files, replacing them with fresh files that should work. I also strongly suggest you check the Microsoft website (www.microsoft.com) for updates and patches for Word. To avoid this happening again, when you run a computer session where no errors occur, backup your registry manually. Go to Start menu > Run, and type in ‘regedit’ followed by clicking OK. Click the ‘Registry’ menu and ‘Export registry file’ and save it to a safe location. If your registry does get seriously damaged then you can restore it the same way, except you need to select ‘Import registry file’ instead of exporting it.