Jim Lad -

It's not too uncommon for an OS upgrade to fail to carry programs intact into the new installation. This is especially likely when you have more than one version of a program on the machine at the time of upgrade. Quite likely, the upgrade saved Office 2007, since it's the current version under Vista, and failed to keep all of Office 2003 or "mislinked" some of it's functions.

If this is what happened, you probably will want to reinstall Office 2003 if you really think you need to keep both. In previous versions of Windows/Office, a "repair install" usually would not damage files you'd created (.doc, .dot and .docx, dota in this case for Word) but I haven't used Vista enough to verify that this is true for it, so a backup would be recommended.

You might also be experiencing an "authentication" problem. Earlier Office suites could be moved from one computer to another, but Microsoft has recently been known to "cripple" earlier programs until you visit their site and verify that the copy is legal. Office 2003, for an OEM version, could be limited to the machine it came on, and/or verification for multiple versions on the same machine may require special actions on your part.

In earlier Win versions, Windows Explorer would let you search for filenames (e.g. *.do* for Word should find everything) and once the search was complete a Ctl-A would select all, Ctl-C to copy, and go to a place where you want the backup and Ctl-V to paste them all safely. Vista "Search" is so "vastly improved" that I haven't yet found a way to do that kind of a search, and the method loses "file tree information" since everything would go into a single folder; so I'd probably use a command line XCOPY or the new ROBOCOPY to make a backup.

The built-in backup in Vista is said to be "greatly improved" but past history with Microsoft "backup" does not inspire confidence - try it if you're brave enough. (Microsoft backup has generally indicated successful performance - but I'd suggest verifying that "restore" also works anytime a Microsoft backup is used for the first time. Some previous versions have omitted the restore half of the operation, and others have permitted restoring only "inconvenient forms" of the backup.)

Appearance of "improved" and "Vista" in the same text is also close to a "red flag warning" and "greatly improved" is a red flag with sirens and bells - based on my limited experience with Vista thus far. Vista may turn out to be okay, or even pretty good; but I'm looking for someone to teach me the new baby-talk so I can find the instructions. Adult language or traditional tech words and phrases simply don't work in the new searches, in help files or at Microsoft's web resources. (The new "indexed search" is much faster than the old methods. It finds nothing much more quickly.)

John