Catalogue of disaster

Birdie158,
MS Works may have clipboard limitations that you are seeing.

You may want to have a look at OpenOffice.
It's free and is not saddled with all the limitations of MS Works.
It can read all your MS Works files, and MS Office files as well.
After some preliminary familiarization with its menus you will be very satisfied with the performance.
(One of the things it can do is export Office files as a PDF type so anyone can read it with Adobe reader.)
The site for the download, etc. is here:
http://www.openoffice.org/

The large User Guides (PDF) are here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wik ... e_Chapters

The machine looks OK to me from the standpoint of malware.
askey127

Clipboard limitations there certainly are in Works, although they are not always flagged as the reason for various hiccups even though they undoubtedly usually are.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I have avoided using OpenOffice as I suspect that although it may suffer few of the limitations of Works, it is not really a complete substitute for MS Office. Like it or not, Office is so close to being a universal standard amongst professional users, that I suspect that I would have to go through at least some of the same loops with OpenOffice as I do with Works when sending documents and spreadsheets to third parties, where very often pdf's aren't acceptable (Cute works fine where they are, BTW).

A change to Office awaits significantly better finances and a cheap deal somewhere.

Very many thanks for your time and help - even complex problem-solving and analysis I always find a pleasurable challenge, but not in something as abstract and opaque to me as software - your abilities in that have my utmost admiration.

Thanks again