I'm running Office97 on WinXP-pro. I would like to be able to use a
query with mail merge to select records. When I seek to execute a
query, machine hangs up and I get error message, "Word could not
re-establish DDE connection to Microsoft Query to complete the current
task."

When I first installed Office97 for original CD's, everything worked
fine. Sometime later, after a Microsoft strongly suggested I upgrade
certain files to eliminate a vulnerability problem, mail merge no longer
worked.

I first ran into this problem years ago when running Office97 on Win98.
Mail merge worked when office was first installed, and later quit after
I accidentally installed a Microsoft "upgrade." Recently when I
upgraded to WinXP, I had the same experience again. Mail merge worked
immediately after Office was installed, but malfunctioned somewhat later
undoubtedly due to my installing Microsoft vulnerability fixes. (I
understand that the old ODBC file had vulnerability issues.)

The problem seems to be the same whether I'm seeking to use a dbase or
Excel formated file as the data source.

Running Microsoft's MDAC component compatibility checker (CC.exe)
version 2.0 does not produce an indication of any compatibility problems.

Any suggestions would be welcome.