I have MS Office 2000 installed on a new Windows XP machine. MS Word 2000 generally has worked well and continues to work well, except for one Word document that I downloaded from the internet (originally prepared on a Macintosh machine with MS Word 98) that won't open. It gives a message that a Read Only file can be opened, but in fact, when the button is pushed, another message arises that "MS Word must close." However, when I try to delete this MS Word document, I get a message that "file cannot be deleted because it is in use by another user or another application." I cannot even place this file into a folder as I get the same message about another user or application is in use. A Search doesn't reveal any other applications in use, so it appears the file was corrupted being downloaded, or the old MS Word 2000 has some incompatibility with the newer Windows XP?

I'd appreciate any help to delete this document from my desktop, and guidance as to how to prevent recurrence. Thanks

Try deleting the file from safe mode. That should remove anything that would try and allocate the file.

Rightclick file, select open with and choose notepad, that should do the trick to BC BTW