Frank F, thanks for the idea. AOL was at150,000 in memory. MS word was in the 297,00 range, so I upped it to 300,000 for ms word. I'm just going to restart now and see. Arent' these amount of memory alloated to AOL and MS HUGE? they seem like they are. The biggest doc we use in MS word is about 90 pages single spaced, no pictures, no weird stuff in formatting, except we use 'arrange all' to get three pages on the screen at once. ( am sorry, I do not know what 1024s are, I assums k's?) (I turned off vm, a fellow onlist emailed me about that, so that part is done) dang this is driving me to the nut house kub