When I run Windows 98 and Word 7 at home there are a couple of annoying glitches. Often when I open a Word document, a dialogue box (with beep) comes up telling me that “Word could not fire event”. As if to contradict this message, when I click OK, the file is opens without problem. How can I prevent the dialogue box and beep ever appearing again please? Another problem is that, for some mysterious reason, I have to insert a space (or extra space) if I want an apostrophe or quotation marks to appear when a word or phrase begins or ends with a letter in lower case. It can be a real pain having to remember this or later having to add the punctuation or spaces. Again, could you please advise me how to rectify that problem?

Problems concerning the error message ‘Word could not fire event’ are normally related in some way to a macro virus. This is because either you have a macro virus currently on your computer, or you had a macro virus on your computer (which has now been cleaned) but Word still thinks it is there and is trying to execute the macro virus. The first step I suggest you take is, to update your virus scanner with the latest virus definitions and then scan your computer for viruses. If you do not have a virus scanner, a very good one is InnoculateIT. This is a free virus scanner and can be downloaded from antivirus.cai.com . After scanning your computer and cleared any viruses, restart Word and see if the problem persists. If it does, or during the virus scan no viruses were found, I refer you to this article in Microsoft Knowledge Base: support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q162/0/53.asp . The information in this article is mostly related to Word 97 but you should be able to apply most of it to Word 7 as well. Regarding the second part of your question, I can’t offer any advice because I don’t fully understand the question. What happens if you try to insert a apostrophe or quotation mark without inserting a space? If you could contact me again with more information and possibly an example, that would help me diagnose the problem for you. If any other readers recognise this problem and can offer a solution, please contact me so I can pass the suggestions onto Colin.