Last year sometime, I was doing some work using Word 2000, and it crashed big time, freezing up my whole system. When I restarted my computer and loaded Word again, the menu and toolbar were gone, which left a lot of functionality unavailable. I figured the whole Word installation was fucked, but since I could still view documents in it, it was pretty much good enough to meet my needs.

But at work, we're discontinuing support for Word 6.0a and WordPerfect 6.1 (thank the devil), so I needed to have a fully-functioning version of Word 2000 on my machine. So this evening, I borrowed an Office 2K CD and tried installing over the existing installation, but Word was still screwed up. I completely uninstalled Office then, and reinstalled--still nothing. My final option was to get on the web and search for a solution, and I found one quite easily. All I had to do is add the /a command-line switch to the Word shortcut, and it solved all my problems. For nearly six months, I've been living with the problem of not having a menu or toolbar, and all it took was less than a minute to look for and implement a solution. Sucky-sucky.