I purchased a laptop computer about three months ago with Word 97 already installed. I create a lot of documents in Word and I have found that when I open documents created in the last six weeks or so and then close them without altering them, a prompt comes up asking whether I want to save the changes even though there aren’t any. Documents created before that time close without the prompt appearing. I also have a desktop computer loaded with Word 2000. Identical documents are present on that computer but the prompt mentioned above does not appear when closing provided no alterations are made. The only thing I can think of is that, about six weeks ago, I installed Via Voice and linked it to Word 97. It is present on the laptop but not the desk top. Could this be causing the problem even though it is not open when I use Word 97? One other mysterious thing: when I close Word 97 on the laptop it asks me whether I want to save changes to aware97.dot. I have used Word 97 on other systems and have found no reference to aware97.dot. I have searched the Internet and found no reference to aware97.dot. What is this file and how can I get rid of that prompt?

The most likely reason that you are asked if you want to save changes, even though there appears to be none, is possibly because the documents were created by another version of Word (you mentioned you had Word 2000 as well) or another program all together. This means that when Word opens the document, it needs to convert the file into a format recognisable by Word and therefore changes the document, even though it may look like it hasn’t been changed at all! To check this theory, open a document which gives you the prompt to save changes when you close it and save the document with a new name in Word format. Reopen the document and see if the problem persists. If it doesn’t, then you know what the problem is. However, if it does please contact me again and I will research the problem some more for you. As for your question about aware97.dot, I searched some technical support sites on the internet and found that aware97.dot may be part of an OCR application. OCR stands for optical character recognition. When you scan a document using OCR, it recognises the text and coverts it to a text document for you. If you have any of this kind of application installed on your computer, close them by doing a CTRL-ALT-DEL and see if the problem persists. If the problem does persist, I suggest that you try reinstalling Word and see if that makes a difference (this might also be a fix for the ’save prompt’ problem). If any other readers have suggestions to assist with Leon’s problem, please feel free to write in.