I have a client who has been using Office XP without any trouble for months (years even). Yesterday she started to experience a weird problem. She had been in Outlook all day, reading and writing messages as usual, and she opened up an email and wanted to forward it to someone. When she clicked on "Forward," she says she saw a shadowy box for the Office Assistant (our friend the paper clip), and then it disappeared and Outlook froze. When she restarted Outlook, she got this message: "There are no Office Assistant character files present on the system. Please run Setup in Maintenance mode and install at least one character." This behavior continues today, and it is happening in all the Office applications. She has restarted Outlook and Word a number of times, and has also restarted the machine, but the behavior continues. Has anyone seen this before, and can you suggest a fix? Thanks, Elise ************************************************************* You are receiving this mail because you subscribed to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or MicrosoftOffice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To send mail to the group, simply address it to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To Unsubscribe from this group, visit the group's homepage and use the dropdown menu at the top. This will allow you to unsubscribe your email address or change your email settings to digest or vacation (no mail). //www.freelists.org/webpage/mso To be able to use the files section for sharing files with the group, send a request to mso-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx and you will be sent an invitation with instructions. Once you are a member of the files group, you can go here to upload/download files: http://www.smartgroups.com/vault/msofiles If you are using Outlook and you see a lot of unnecessary code in your email messages, read these instructions that explain why and how to fix it: http://personal-computer-tutor.com/abc3/v28/greg28.htm *************************************************************