Thankyou both Bruce and Ron, for answering my questions and helping to
clarify things for me. I have found reading all these newsgroup messages
much more enlightening than trying to find solutions in the help and
troubleshooting files of certain programs and certainly much more helpful
than my computers oem techs (who seem to think the answer for everything is
to uninstall and reinstall and then all the extra work of restoring settings
and files only to find that the problem has not been solved!!!)

Seeing that many of the issues in this forum have been known for some time,
it's unfortunate that these are not included in the instructions and help
files with the programs....it would have saved me many wasted DAYS...maybe
MS will include this info in future version's troubleshooting sections...not
that i'd like to see you out of your jobs....but many of these problems seem
to be so common!! I'd have looked here long ago, but I had a great deal of
trouble just getting subscribed, and then a whole day of work just to get a
message posted...I couldn't post because OE told me no sender was
identified!?!? Couldn't find instructions in the help files but finally I
have figured it out!!

Bruce, I think your "advice to help keep problems to a minimum" should be
the front page of OE or the first page of the help files....I suspect this
room would be empty most of the time! I already do follow this advice, but I
had to figure it all out (time-consuming) by trial & error or by mistake!

Thank you both again for helping me get a grip on all this, I think I should
be good now, but I have one more question regarding the patch you suggested
(KB918766)

This computer is only 4 months old...supposed to be a high performance
laptop...Centrino Duo Core, Windows XPsp2 Pro MCE 2005, 1024 MB RAM, ATi
Radeon x1400 video card (although i am quite sure the video card has a
hardware problem, but thats another story) so my question is this...

I keep windows and office up-to-date with ALL high-priority AND optional
updates. Microsoft.update tells me there are no other updates available for
my system. I could not find KB918766 listed under the add/remove programs
(and i do have "show updates" checked). Do I already have this update in one
of the other cumulative updates and/or why doesn't microsoft.update offer
this patch when i check? I haven't downloaded this patch from your link yet
as I do not want to cause a conflict or reversal of any of the other updates
I have received, so your answer to this question would be greatly
appreciated. Thanks once more - Dan