Thanks to all those who responded to my questions.  Art Cassel
asked some questions.  The answers are:
a.      I have run the machine with a bare install and it still regularly
crashed;
b.      there is no separate swap partition;
c.      once everything (word and excel 2000) is loaded there is
300meg free; and,
d.      Yes it crashes if left alone every ten minutes or so.

        I have looked at the possibility of an overheating cpu but there
is a fan near the processor (though not on it) and it does not crash
with win95 installed after over 2 hours.
        From the responses to my questions I consider that the owner
needs to either go back to win95 and parts of Office 97 or invest in
a bigger HDD and more RAM.

Thanks again folks
Rick

In Queensland life is a real beach!

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