Word 2000

Before I state my question, let me say that I did not personally witness
what the user did, or what happened in the aftermath. I got my report
second hand, so it's hard to say what truly transpired. That being said,
here is what I was told...

A few weeks ago one of the users that I support lost several hours of work
because Word crashed unexpectedly and he had not saved his document, and
then Word failed to recover his file when it restarted. The user has Word
set to save autorecovery information every 10 minutes. When Word did not
recover the file automatically after being restarted, the user attempted to
find the .WBK file, but was not able to locate the file.

With regards to the .WBK file, I suspect that the user was looking in the
wrong location because the file location for autorecover files is different
than the document and startup file locations, and the user is not
sophisticated enough with Word to know how to find the correct file
location. However, in theory the file location should not matter, and Word
should have been able to recover the file. But alas, I know that theory
does not often match the real world. This might be something of a broad
question, but what are the possible causes of Word's failure to recover the
file, and how might I go about making the autorecovery operation more
reliable?

--Tom