RoboHelp Word Errors and Malfunctions

[Sara Stewart <sara -at- sara-stewart -dot- com>]

Hi, everyone,

I'm a new RHW user and having a terrible time with it:

I inherited a file from the previous TW at the company where I'm 
consulting, and it is completely a mess.  I've also added about 10K 
words to it and a bunch of screenshots.

I keep getting Word Error Code 1257 intermittently when I try to save 
the file (and I did consult the Adobe knowledge base to find a fix for 
it, and then turn all autosave functions in Word off as suggested, but 
it keeps happening). When I get this error code, it claims that the file 
is in use by another process and it won't save.  If I try to close the 
file, I can't save it, and sometimes it crashes my machine.

On top of that, when I reopen my projects, all the topic links are 
broken and the .cnt file is missing. I have tried resolving the links, 
one at a time, and I'm having trouble getting them inserted in the 
correct places in the document. Is there any way to automate or speed up 
the process? I have a 40 000 word help document with 288 topics.

Can anyone tell me a) what's going on and why this is happening, and b) 
how I can fix it with a minimal amount of pain and anguish? I have tried 
manually rebuilding the file in RHW (and I got Word Error 1257 again, 
then my manually-rebuilt file was corrupted). I have tried (re)importing 
the .doc source file into RHHTML and RHWord, and it crashed both times.

I am using Word 2000. I don't know what version the original file was 
built in; the company seems to have several.

I don't even know what's wrong, but I think there are potentially 
several problems here:

1)  My version of Word is incompatible with the file somehow and/or with 
RoboHelp;
2)  The original file is a mess (there are 143 styles in it, which I 
didn't do, for instance) which means it won't import cleanly;
3)  The file is overwhelming my system resources (it's 1.2GB, 
approximately);
4)  I've done something in RoboHelp that is causing the problem and I 
can't diagnose it or fix it because I don't know the app that well.

The only possible solution I've come up with so far is to rebuild the 
entire file basically from scratch in RHHTML, and I really don't want to 
do that if I don't have to.  Help?

Thanks,

Sara Stewart

--
Sara Stewart Communications
Technical Writing, Editing,
and Specialty Research Services
www.sara-stewart.com

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