I really don't think it's a hardware problem. FLStudio is extremely intensive on RAM and just about every other piece of hardware with possible exception of display.

Do you know of any diagnostic software that would settle the question one way or the other?

Re other installations, Word was behaving like this before I installed other software apart from Opera, Avast and Chrome (which came with Avast - forgot to uncheck the box - and has never been run on this installation).

If there are conflicts with any of these programmes, I don't understand why, after months of conflict free functionality they would suddenly start to act up.

To be honest, this problem reminds me of an issue I had with an old version of Word, where documents kept being corrupted and the programme crashed. Everything apart from Word was blamed, but in the end it turned out to be an instability in Word itself - something to do with versions.

This time, I keep losing graphics from these files, as well as the files not saving. Frankly, there are aspects of graphic handling in word that seem very unfinished, and I wouldn't be surprised if the culprit lies somewhere in that area.

I will try storing the graphics separately for a while and see that does anything.