Has anyone ever heard of someone saving a file, such as a word document...

[Princess Turandot]

and naming it with the executable name, basically replacing the executable file with a non-working document now named 'winword.exe'.
It tells her that 'Winword.exe is not a valid W32 Application' now.
My cousin, who lives far away from me, seems to have done this, and now cannot get Word to launch. She says she received various warnings before she finalized the command. To compound matters,she is running Win95. I'm not sure that she has the Word installation disks.

[steely]

1. ouch - did she really name the new file winword.exe?

guess she can't tell you which version of word it is (like 6.0)?.

[Princess Turandot]

2. I had asked her for the version in our email exchange prior to this..

I cannot swear that that is what she did, but I can't think of any other way for an executable program like Word to be knocked out by saving a document.

She received an employment application which she could not open, so she sent it to me. I was able to open it with Word from Office 2000, saved it as a Word 6.0-Windows 95.doc and sent it back to her. In the meanwhile, she had also asked her brother to help her, and he somehow emailed the application back to her as content in an email, not an attachment. I think that was the document she saved. I told her to do a search for winword.exe, thinking she might have just moved the .exe file and she got back:

"C:\MSOffice\Winword 448KB Application Modified 12/29/2004 at 6:54AM"
followed by:

"Winword.exe is not a valid W32 Application" lol.

I'm pretty sure that she can afford a new computer but has stubbornly refused to do so because she thinks it will be harder to work with than what she has. This may do it for her.

[Princess Turandot]

3. I received a response from my cousin..

she did exactly that: renamed a document as winword.exe
I gotta take another look at the family gene pool lol