Thank you both for the reassurance it took only a good old fashioned reboot to fix this one, merely coming out of Word was not enough. I had tried that anyway.

"Stressed editor" ignored the obvious. I find Word pretty stable normally, but I was punch drunk after using Corel 12 a lot yesterday and that can be very flaky.

I was after all doing a lot of cut and paste, had noticed the ~Wxxx.tmp coming and going but this one stayed.

A friend from long ago earns her crust as computer support in industrial systems and she claimed then that a reboot every now and then was a good idea if some complex, step by step procedure was being applied

In case anyone is interested.

Less panic and more thought should have been observed. Im now convinced I confused the poor PC by too many save-as while disregarding the fact that I was dealing with a number of files mostly .doc some open some closed with different subscripts for the same documents.

(i.e. doc and docx willy nilly.) Although I can save as docx the converter works without complaint.... normally..... what I was doing was stoopid!