Spell-Check Won't Work in Word 2000 with a Word 2003 Document

Barry has a document created in Word 2003 that he can't seem to spell-check when editing in Word 2000. When he tries to start the spell-checker, he gets an error message indicating that some essential DLL files don't exist, even though Barry knows they are on the system. In addition, other documents created in Word 2000 can be spell-checked just fine on the system, and the Word 2003 document will spell-check just fine on a Word 2003 system.

This sounds like it is probably a case of document corruption. The corruption is small, most likely in a part of the document that is somehow not critical on the Word 2003 system, but a "deal breaker" on the Word 2000 system. The way to find out if this is truly the case is to go through the process of creating a new Word 2003 document, all over again, and then trying to open it under Word 2000 and doing a spell-check. If you don't get the error, you know it is the single document.

Next, take the document to somebody else's computer on which Word 2000 is running and try to open and spell-check the document there. If it works on that system, then you know that the problem lies not with the document, but with the installation of Word 2000 on the system in question.

If it is a problem with the Word 2000 system, then you will need to take corrective steps on that system to repair Word. Just grab the original CDs and run the Office (or Word) setup program. There should be a choice to fix or repair Word. If this doesn't work, you may be looking at a complete removal and reinstall of the program.