Doug,
I tried what you suggested but got error DDE. I had alread checked the
"Confirm conversions at open" relative to the Access 2 converter download.

I found that the Access 2 legacy program is creating a valid .dat file for
the master document requested with the same name as the master document but
in short filename form (remember it is very old). I opened the related Word
master mail merge document and added the .dat file as the data source and
merged without error.

I appears that the process is indeed attempting DDE with short file names
and is unable to identify the file name properly. I don't know whether the
"Not valid filename Merge error (#1056) is from the Main merge document or
the created .dat file of the similar name.

Any other suggestions?

ITJRW
"Doug Robbins" wrote in message
...
Try selecting Options from the Tools menu and then go to the General tab
and check the box against "Confirm conversions at open". Then when you
try to attach the datasource, select the DDE option.

--
Please respond to the Newsgroup for the benefit of others who may be
interested. Questions sent directly to me will only be answered on a
paid consulting basis.

Hope this helps,
Doug Robbins - Word MVP
"ITJRW" wrote in message
...
I am trying to help a prosecutors office with a problem merging documents
that worked prior to installation of Office 2003 and Windows XP. This is
a
very legacy application and the developer refuses to try to fix the
problem.
The application was written in VB 4 and uses Access 2 databases. The
merging attempts give the following errors:

"Merge Errror (Word) #1056 (0)" on title bar of error message and message
is
"Not a valid filename."
The file name is valid and the permissions have been checked. That is
users can open the master merge document and it's associated recordless
header file (.dat) for field selection.

"31031 (0)" on title bar and message "Invalid source for link"

31004 (0) on title bar and message "No object"

This merge is fine on Windows 98 and using Word 97.

What is happening here? I there a way to correct the problem. The data
is
taken from multiple tables in the .mdb file and uses a fairly complex SQL
statement to retrieve the record data.

Could I create a named data source for these merge documents and obtain
the
data (from these multiple tables) using the newer Jet versions or OLE?
How
would I go about that?

Thanks,
Justice