A strange thing happened to my old reliable Word Perfect. It is DOS based,
version 6.1.

The other week, I pressed F2, for Search, and my computer froze up. For the
past few weeks now, it has been a 100% repeatable occurence, and also
happens with backward search and search and replace, which are Shift F2 and
ALT F2, respectively. (CONTROL F2 is the spell check, which works fine.)

So there is definitely no problem with the button, but here is something
even stranger. When I call up the file manager, F5, I can search for a file
name by pressing F2, just as I would do when I'm in a document, and it
works fine. Also, when I am in the file manager and press number3 to look
at the document, I can press the F2 and search for words in that mode.

So the problem is very specific. All functions of the search mode cause my
computer to freeze up, at the instant that I press F2, and only when a
document is open.

When I hit F2, a long horizontal edit box appears, as opposed to a square
box with the text for the various search functions. My sighted roommate
told that to me when I asked him to look. And by the way, pressing that
button didn't trigger that error for the first time when he was looking,
but went to its normal screen. I exited then re-entered Word Perfect, hit
F2 again, and the flaw came back.

Any ideas of what would cause such a particular malfunction? Thanks for any
help.

Peter Seymour


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html