Hi catseye,

FWIW, hardware tends to fail fairly early on, or after a long time. I've bought two new laptops in the last 5 years (from different leading manufacturers) and both needed warranty repairs - one ended up being replaced and the other needed a new mainboard & video card. So don't rule out the hardware. And there's no reason to suppose the same problem would occur with other apps - Word may be using areas of RAM or some other aspect of your hardware in a way that other apps don't.

I am unable to comment on whether any of your applications might conflict with Word, as I don't use any of them. I'm surprised you'd want both FireFox and Chrome (in addition to IE). I have seen reports of Chrome being implicated in copy/paste conflicts with Word, but nothing about saving.

Just to rule out two other possibilities, check for updated printer and display drivers from the makers' websites. Also check that your problem documents aren't trying to use non-standard fonts.

As suggested before, it would have been good to see whether Word worked properly before any of these other apps was installed, then re-test after each new one is installed. Still, that opportunity's passed for now. Software conflicts can be really difficult to pin down. One particular application I have used, but no longer have installed, would kill off tabbed browsing in IE. Took ages to figure out that it was one of my apps, then which one. I went through a number of complete system refreshes. What made it even harder was that I couldn't get tabbed browsing in IE back by uninstalling the application - a system restore to an earlier time was required!

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]