The person who donated her computer to our church had purchased, at the college bookstore she attended, the Microsoft Office 2003 Small Business and had it loaded onto the computer. She said she though it was just a one time download and she got it pretty cheap. It must be a one time down load because I tried to put the program on our laptop and it wouldn't allow me to do that. Is ther any way for me to backup this program in case of computer failure because this computer is acting up. I've thought it would be good for it just to cleanse the whole thing and load everything on again, because the computer had a virus about a month ago and the computer asked for a recovery disc that I didn't have. There are other problems that have been going on before that, though. Do I have any way of backing up this program? Would an image type backup work? I actually don't even know what that is, I just saw it suggested in another case.

The "One-time download" is a Microsoft academic software. Partially quoted: It is intended for educational purposes (school students..) ... As such you cannot use it for any other purposes other than what the license stipulated. i_Xp/VistaUser

You'd only be able to back it up as part of a complete system backup. The original Office 2003 install would have put its files in various places on the drive as well as updating system setting to reflect that installation. You can't just isolate that one program to back up.

Thou shalt not steal.

Since when is backing up stealing?

As to your question re image program, any virus or currupt files would be restored, so you would be back where you started. Another problem you have is not having the restore disk, maybe get someone to have a look at it and see if it still has the restore partition from which to restore the system. While you will loose office, you may have a working computer. Open Office is a good free alternative to MS Office which you can download.