I'm no guru by any means, but ... I seriously doubt that the
installation of 2003 caused the deletion of any files.
IFF those files were kept in the Program Files folder, under the
Office installation, I could see someone possibly having deleted
them by trying to purge the system of old files and folders, but
no details were included in your descrip.
You don't mention checking the Recycle Bin for them, or what the
status of your antivirus/macro protection is/was, and several
other things like SP status, hot fixes, and updates to firewalls,
adware finders, trojan protection, etc. Are you positive you
didn't pick up a Word macro virus? Do you have any recently
departed people with a grudge?
Are you certain the disk searches were done competently? What
happens if you search for say *.doc? How about the *.bak and
*.wbk and Backup Of*.* files? Are any of them still there? Any
chance what you're looking for are .DOT files and not .DOC? I've
heard of stranger things happening.

Since these sound like "old' files, they were backed up, even
archived, right? How about those for sources of recovery? You
DO back up important files, right? If not, good luck, I've
little else to say because they really weren't "important" or you
would have backed them up or at least had them exist in more than
one place.

Pop



Friendship Center wrote:
We are a nonprofit organization that had been running MS
Office 2000. We recently got Office 2003. We ran and
installed it and everything went well.

Then we went to open some of our documents that we use
within the office that contains a lot of important data.
Suddenly, random documents were completely missing off
the hard drive. We did searches for the documents by
name and partial name. Nothing came up.

The only issue we can think of is that the installation
asked for the older Office 2000 CD, which has been in
storage for some time and the installer rather than go
get it clicked cancel and the installation resumed. The
programs all worked, but the documents that are needed
are missing.

Now, most of the documents are still on the drive and
work fine in the new program. However, the ones that are
missing are important and were there prior to
installation.

Can anyone determine if the installation process caused
the documents to disappear, or if the way it was
installed caused this, or if it must be some other
reason? The computer is in good shape, a HP Pavillion
XE749 with stock components. No other problems have
arrived.

If these documents are gone, what can be done to recover
them? Any ideas? The only clue here was the
installation of Office 2003.

Thanks