Hey all-- My wife is having problems with her flash drive at work, running on XP Pro: she saves Word docs directly to the drive--and is very careful to properly "Safely Remove Hardware"--but the docs won't open the next day. She's sent me a couple screenshots: one of them is asking for the type of encoding on the document, trying to do a file conversion, and the other says "the document or path is not valid." Is it possible that the flash drive itself is acting up, or is this a problem with Word, or what? The drive is not quite a year old, and she probably updates it every couple of days. Thanks, Eric

Is she attempting to open the files on the same computer as they were created? Newer versions of Word default to .docx format, which can't be read by older versions without a patch. That said, your wife should save two copies on two different media to be safe. IMO, flash media is the least reliable of any media. Flash drives should be used for transport of duplicate copies, not the only copy.

She's using the same computer, and I believe she's using Word 2003, although I'm not absolutely sure.

Flash drives are only good for a finite number of cycles. If all the files have been saved to the root directory the problem could be that the allowable number of files in the root directory has been exceeded. Try copying the files to the host computer instead of opening them directly. If that works it may be a good idea to copy ALL the files on the flash drive and after verifying their integrity reformatting the flash drive. Then use folders and save to a folder.

Thanks--I'll do that!