I need your help for the following reason. When executing Access, usually my requests for online help (either by pressing or by means of the paper clip Office Assistant), end up with what follows: either garbled - or missing - text, and/or a message telling me that the help program has performed an illegal operation. I am using Microsoft Windows 95 OSR2 and have 30MB of RAM and 160MB of free hard disk space. I execute Access in isolation (ie. with no other applications, to my knowledge, open). I have been told that the cause of the problem is having ‘not enough memory’. Nevertheless, on the box of Microsoft Office 97 it is stated that ‘To use Microsoft Office Professional you need 8MB of memory to run Microsoft Access and 40 - 128MB of hard disk space (depending on your setup preferences) to install the application. Could you please instruct me on how to correct this problem and also tell me what is causing it? Thanks.

There are four possible reasons for this error occurring. Firstly, you may have multiple keyboard layouts enabled on your computer. Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem with Access 97 and it has been amended in Access 2000. To fix this problem you must disable the multiple keyboard layouts which can be done from the ‘Control Panel’ > ‘Keyboard’. Click the ‘Language’ tab and remove all the keyboard layouts until you only have one left (the default keyboard layout for Windows 95 is ‘EN English (United States)’ - I suggest that you use this one as it is the Windows 95 default layout). A second cause of the problem could be that your ‘winhelp.exe’ file could be damaged or corrupt. You can fix this by extracting a new copy of ‘winhelp.exe’ from Win95_05.cab on your Windows 95 CD-ROM or if you have the disk version of Windows 95 then it can be found on Disk 6 in Win95_06.cab. You can extract the file from the cabinet file on your Windows CD or disk by using the ‘Extract’ command from the MS-DOS prompt. This is quite a difficult process to follow and because you are new to the Windows operating system I have posted you instructions on how to do this. The document came from Microsoft Knowledge Base but I did edit out irrelevant text so that it is easier for you to follow. For anyone who is interested in this and connected to the internet, you can find this article at: support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q129/6/05.ASP. The third reason that your problem could be occurring is because of a known bug in Access 97. In this case I suggest that you go to Microsoft Office Update officeupdate.microsoft.com and download the update for Microsoft Office from that site. If you don’t have internet access ask one of your friends to download it for you; and I also strongly suggest you get on to the internet. I often refer to updates and patches you can obtain from the internet. Now most companies are only putting updates on their website for people to download because it is more economical and convenient for both the company and their users. You could of course reinstall Access 97 as a last resort. If you get to this stage then the cause of the problem is more than likely to do with the application being in some way corrupted and the only viable thing to do in that circumstance is to reinstall the affected application.