I'm working on a new hard drive with a fresh install of Windows XP and have been slowly rebuilding my apps and directories since January.
Recently, while working on a critical document for class, and after several hours of labor, Word absolutely refused to save the file to my hard drive. Had I been thinking, I might have tried saving the file to my second drive or my external drive. But you know how it is. Late at night, tired, and panic tends to cut out my higher self-management skills. It seemed as if the hard drive had suddenly become read-only but that was impossible. It seemed to be working fine otherwise. And it only seemed to happen after I'd been working on a document for about 20 minutes or so. Word otherwise behaved typically (I always avoid the use of the word "normal" with Word.)
Afterward, I ran the XP disk doctor and defrag, and even reinstalled Office 2000. I noticed that Word acted snappier than before. Surely, Shirley, my problems were o'er.
But just a few minutes ago, this infuriating behavior happened again. I printed out the document this time, so I could at least rebuild the document later. And then, because Google is your friend, I searched on "microsoft word not saving my documents!".
Scanning the results led me to this IBM page from 2004 where we discover that
In Windows XP, Microsoft sets the My Documents folder as read-only...Windows XP no longer cares about the "read" state of directories, only of files. As far as the XP operating system is concerned, security permissions replaced the "read-only" folder attribute.WTF?? I checked the properties for My Documents, and sure enough, its read-only attribute was set. I turned it off for My Documents and its subdirectories. So I'm now hoping against hope that I've seen the last of this problem.
