MS Word Distortions

I'm not quite sure what's going on here. A lady I work has a graphical problem in word. Almost whenever she scrolls up or down with the arrow on the scroll bar, she starts to see duplicate lines of text in the document. It's just a little graphical anomaly, but it's impossible to work with. If she closes the document and opens it again, it's obviously gone. It's a Dell GX1, and is using the latest video drivers, and the latest BIOS. Any input into this would be appreciated. She is working with a Windows NT machine. She has been having this problem for a while now, so I reformatted her machine and reinstalled everything. The problem is back now. She claims that another lady who works on the same documents in Word 97 doesn't ever get this. Damn that was long. Any help appreciated.

Try disabling/enabling smooth scrolling: <a href="http://www.mydesktophelp.com/tips/win33.htm" target="_blank">http://www.mydesktophelp.com/tips/win33.htm</a>

Try disabling font smoothing.

Try enabling Word Live Scrolling (v97): <a href="http://www.jsiinc.com/subc/tip1300/rh1305.htm" target="_blank">http://www.jsiinc.com/subc/tip1300/rh1305.htm</a>

As a last resort, switch her machine with another employee who doesn't use Word.

Also these MSKB Q articles:
<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q160/0/68.asp" target="_blank">http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q160/0/68.asp</a>
<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q164/2/73.asp" target="_blank">http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q164/2/73.asp</a>
IMPORTANT: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q166/7/03.ASP" target="_blank">http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q166/7/03.ASP</a>
<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q166/9/77.ASP" target="_blank">http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q166/9/77.ASP</a>
<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q169/2/56.ASP" target="_blank">http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q169/2/56.ASP</a>

I've found that I occasionally get garbled text (doubled lines, etc.) while working with Word 97 and 2000 under Windows 2000 (I also would see it under WinNT4). I can usually get the screen to clear by dragging the scroll bar up or down to force Word to redraw the screen.

That said, however, I have had documents generate garbled text on one computer that won't always show up on another computer when viewing the same document. My experience has shown that the document's file is corrupted. To correct the problem, I scroll downward from the top of the document to the approximate location just above where the text starts to go spazzy. I cut that block of text out and paste it into a new document. Then I close the document, re-open it, do a [Ctrl]-[End] to get to the end of the document. I scroll upward from the bottom of the ducment to the approximate location just below where the text starts to go spazzy again. I again cut that block of text and paste it into the new document. Finally, I manually re-create the block of text that was corrupted, or try to find that block of text from a previously saved backup that was not corrupted.

My experience has shown that the probability of getting a corrupted document like this increases proportionally with the nearness of the due date. It seems like I can regularly get Word to have a spaz attack when I'm approaching a hard deadline. I've learned to save often, using multiple filenames to ensure that multiple versions exist.

I've found that turning off fast saves in Word seems to have reduced or eliminated the document corruption problem (from the menu, go to Tools, then Options; click on the Save tab, then uncheck the "Allow fast saves" option). It'll also keep your documents at their smallest possible size since change information isn't being stored in the document file. You might want to try that... :D

Thanks for the snappy replies you two.

Mac -

I tried the smooth scrolling and the live scrolling reg tweaks with no luck. I thought that they might do it, but I guess not. The KB articles were interesting but not applicable.

Spiff -

That's exactly what I'm talking about with doubled lines and such. My exact solution would normally be to just move the scroll bar a few times, but this lady spends most of her day typing up these forms. I'll probably end up just swapping her machine with a similar one.


Thanks again to both of you, I know how long it takes sometimes to look up solutions like this. I appreciate it.

Its the video card. Probably one with an insufficeint amout of memory on it. How many applications is she running at the time of the problem? What OS are you using? Are your memory resources maxing out?

[quote]Originally posted by Dante:
<strong>Its the video card. Probably one with an insufficeint amout of memory on it. How many applications is she running at the time of the problem? What OS are you using? Are your memory resources maxing out?</strong><hr></blockquote>

As mentioned above, this is a Windows NT machine and a Dell GX1. It will happen immediately after a reboot the exact same way that it will happen if the PC's been on for 48 hours. Once again, it'll happen if she only got Word open, or if there are 10 windows open. Memory is far from maxed out. It will be hard to convince me that the video card doesn't have enough memory to run Microsoft Word. ;)

I just got to thinking though, is there a Graphics acceleration tab in NT like in 95? Maybe I'll try turning that down a few notches, to see if there's any effect.