Lotus WordPro and Windows XP -- Compatibility probs?

Factual Questions
1

The girlfriend uses WordPro as her word process of choice. About six months ago, her Compaq laptop breathed its last and she upgraded to a Sony with XP Pro. We reinstalled her apps from installation CD, of course. WordPro is the Millennium Edition, i.e., most recent release as far as I know. Odd problems keep plaguing her–

  • yesterday she tried using the “custom symbol menu” to insert the “micro” symbol for microgram, or the divided-by symbol. But the menu box came up “disembodied”, its little selection fields floating by themselves and suspended over the document rather than within its normal window, and it was inaccessible to keyboard or mouse.

  • her toolbar customizations disappeared and she had to reconstruct her custom toolbar from scratch.

  • on many occasions she’s gotten the “application not responding” syndrome, where clicking on the WordPro rectangle on the Windows toolbar won’t bring it forward and Ctrl-Alt-Delete indicates that WordPro is “not responding”. This is in spite of 512 MB of RAM and a gig and two thirds’ worth of P-4 hertz and a half-empty C drive with 8 gigs unused. The scratch file is mapped to the even-emptier D drive which has 60 gigs on which maybe 2.5 gigs of stuff is rattling around. Everything is of recent defragmentation. The only things she tends to have running at the same time as WordPro are FileMaker Pro (local files only, no networking), Internet Explorer (rarely any media-heavy or flash-enabled pages open), and Eudora. I’m a Mac person and possibly way ignorant of PC things, but it seems to me that ought be enough oomph to run every program she’s got simultaneously without this kind of lockup? We did disable the following services/processes, and it did improve general performance (especially in Eudora) but didn’t help WordPro much:

Anyone else using the combo of Lotus WordPro (ME) and XP? Any problems? Underpublicized patches or bug fix releases?

2

Remember that the last real version of WordPro (Millennium Edition) was released in 1998, well before XP became available, so problems might be expected. However, I run WordPro on Win2K, which is almost the same as XP in most of the ways that matter. Never had any problems with WordPro on 2K.

Note that WordPro is basically an orphaned product; development/maintenance of the WordPro codebase was moved from Atlanta to India in 2000, IIRC. I was on the WordPro development team from 1996-98, and was one of the first to be laid off – the canary in the coal mine, as it were.

3

Is “moved from Atlanta to India” tantamount to “no more versions will be released?”

That would be sad. Word processing programs are dying everywhere, many of them quite good. If a Mac version of WordPro had come out, I would have considered it.

Meanwhile, it’s good to know that WordPro works well on your machine under 2K. That indicates that under ideal circumstances it should work fine under XP too.