I have for a few years used office 2000 as my word processing and I have to admit that it has not been completely legit and thus has not worked very properly either. I finally tired when I was trying to write a story and the damn program kept interrupting me every 2 minutes asking me about language and complaining about lacking dictionaries. So I did a search on google on free word processing and found AbiWord as a free source program. After installing and testing it a little it seems very good but you never know. Do anyone have any experience with this program or do you know of any other good legal free word processing program? It needs to be able to work with .doc files as I tend to send my school papers back and forth to people.

Funny, I use Office 2000 and it is pretty reliable. I never get the sort of stuff you're discussing.

I think that the Office format is proprietary, meaning that any program not from Microsoft using it is in copyright violation (don't quote me on this).

It's like all their other API stuff. They open-source a bunch of it, but there's some really critical stuff they hold back.

Open Office has done a good job in the past, but it's been a long time since I've messed with it so I don't know what v1.1 is like.

Get OpenOffice, it's the best free M$ alternative out there. And it supports (importing) Word docs.

http://www.openoffice.org/