[Mark Casemore (VCS)]

I have a user who informed me there machine crashed yesterday while she was
using Word, upon login back in, the documents had been set to 0 length byte
files(Office 2003 Pro on Windows XP SP2) I know the question pretty much
gives me the answer but I am looking for anyone else who has experienced this
or does anyone know of any issues that could cause this. Thanks.

[Jay Freedman]

I've never heard of a malfunction of Word itself that set files to
zero length -- not to say that it can't happen, but it must be rare.
But I have heard of more than a few viruses that target Office
documents and zero them out.

Does the machine have an up-to-date antivirus program?

Does the Windows Event Log show any error events from around the time
of the crash? If so, what does their detail description say?

You're correct that it's very unlikely the documents can be recovered
-- now you know why backups are a good idea. You might get something
with one of the undelete programs you can find by looking in Google.
The less the machine is used before you do that, the better the
chances of the disk sectors not being overwritten.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:34:01 -0700, Mark Casemore (VCS)
wrote:

I have a user who informed me there machine crashed yesterday while she was
using Word, upon login back in, the documents had been set to 0 length byte
files(Office 2003 Pro on Windows XP SP2) I know the question pretty much
gives me the answer but I am looking for anyone else who has experienced this
or does anyone know of any issues that could cause this. Thanks.

[Mark Casemore (VCS)]

Thanks for the reply, all the machines on our network have their anti virus
software updated automatically from Sophos. I have asked the user to send me
their event logs so I can investigate this further.

Thanks.

"Jay Freedman" wrote:

I've never heard of a malfunction of Word itself that set files to
zero length -- not to say that it can't happen, but it must be rare.
But I have heard of more than a few viruses that target Office
documents and zero them out.

Does the machine have an up-to-date antivirus program?

Does the Windows Event Log show any error events from around the time
of the crash? If so, what does their detail description say?

You're correct that it's very unlikely the documents can be recovered
-- now you know why backups are a good idea. You might get something
with one of the undelete programs you can find by looking in Google.
The less the machine is used before you do that, the better the
chances of the disk sectors not being overwritten.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:34:01 -0700, Mark Casemore (VCS)
wrote:

I have a user who informed me there machine crashed yesterday while she was
using Word, upon login back in, the documents had been set to 0 length byte
files(Office 2003 Pro on Windows XP SP2) I know the question pretty much
gives me the answer but I am looking for anyone else who has experienced this
or does anyone know of any issues that could cause this. Thanks.