I no longer have '97 installed but as I recall I solved this problem by:

Clicking Start - Run
Type "winword.exe/regserver" without the quotes and click on OK.

You might have to unregister winword first if that doesn't work by
itself. To do that,
Type "winword.exe/regserver" without the quotes and click on OK.

Then repeat the first step.

It is worth a try.

"Ted Smith" wrote in message
...
I have Office 97 Professional. I used it successfully on a Win95
machine, but when I upgraded and installed it on WinXP it has an
annoying hiccup. Whenever I double click on a MSWord document it opens
the document fine, but immediately produces the error message ,
"'Filename" is being used by Ted Smith' Do you want to make a copy?"
I just hit escape to get rid of the message and everything is OK from
then on. Similiarly, when I double click on an Excel document I get an
error message indicating that the document is already open, and that I
can't open two documents with the same name, blah blah blah. Does
anyone know a fix for this problem??

Ted Smith