One small housekeeping thing - if you want to quote the original message in your reply, probably the easiest way to do that is to "enable auto quote". You can do this by hovering over the "Message view setup" tab at the top right of the message panel, and clicking on that option.

OK, so it looks like Word *is* being invoked by Outlook when you create an e-mail. Although it doesn't show on the Task Bar, if you go into Task Manager and view the Processes tab, you should see winword.exe as a running process.

If that's the case, I don't have any direct answer for you. In the past I've had to deal with a few cases where Outlook was unable to invoke Word via OLE, and it's usually meant having to reinstall (or repair install) Office and any service packs (doing that is usually quicker and more reliable than trying to figure out the exact cause of a problem like that).

At this point I can think of only a few generic things to try:

- Is the user an Administrator of the problem machine? (to rule out permissions issues)

- In Office 2002 (XP) there is a Detect and Repair function on the Help menu. If Office 2000 has something similar, you could try that

- You could experiment with the Macro Security settings in Word and/or Outlook e.g. in Word 2002 you can go to Tools...Macro...Security. For test purposes, you can set the Security Level to "Low", and on the Trusted Sources tab you can ehable the checkbox that says "Trust access to Visual Basic Project". I don't know if the Office 2000 dialogs are the same

- Do you have any add-ons installed in Word? e.g.some people have the Adobe Writer installed, it adds an add-on to Word. The old 4.x versions are buggy and downright incompatible with newer versions of Office. Other people have Avery Label maker add-ons, but I haven't heard of that one causing any problems

- Some antivirus/security suites can be strict, and might, by default, disable programmatic automation of Outlook and/or Word. The idea is that programs attempting to automate Office could potentially be viruses/worms. You might want to check if your AV has that capability, and if it does, try disabling that. Another relatively simple thing to try is to temporarily disable real-time scanning

- In the past I've found that bloating of the Normal.dot template file in Word can cause some weird problems. Usually this file is small, only 20 - 50K or so. I've seen some cases where for some reason it bloats up to 2.5 - 2.8MB. When this happens, Word is very slow to load (you may also notice this when trying to create a new mail in Outlook, it takes a long time for the Word editor to come up), and Word may behave strangely. The solution here is to rename (or delete) the Normal.dot template file and let Word build a new, fresh one from scratch. This file is profile-specific and is usually located in:

C:\Documents and Settings\{User Name}\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates

>They work independently fine.
>Re-your task: I started Outlook after fresh boot and can create emails without a problem with WORD as my editor. I note in my task manager that Word is not activated during this task so i assume here that WordMail is an integrated program with Outlook and not an independent action.
>
>BTW i went back to the other computer which i am supporting and they have version of Office 2007- this problem
>does not occur.