Hi All,
I think that this is the appropriate place for this question, but please 
forgive me if it is not (and suggest the appropriate place of course).
I cannot get the thesaurus in Word 6 to work properly on my pc at home.  No 
matter what I do it ALWAYS says that the word has not been found, but it does 
always give the closest word or phrase in spelling to it under 'Alphabetical 
List'.  My guess is that this information comes from the thesaurus file, 
suggesting that Word is able to actually find the thesaurus file itself.  I 
don't have any tools that I know of that would enable me to make sense of the 
thesaurus and/or grammar files to confirm it.  I have lived with the problem 
for a while, but would like to try to get to the bottom of it.  The spell 
check function which is somewhat related has always worked fine.
I am running Office v4.2(c) with Windows 95.   When I found that the 
thesaurus wasn't working the first thing I did was check Tools; Options; File 
Locations; Dictionaries.  It was set to c:\msoffice\winword but my thesaurus 
and spell files were in c:\windows\msapps\proof (which is where win.ini and 
winword6.ini said they were).  I changed Tools; Options; File Locations; 
Dictionaries to c:\windows\msapps\proof (which also matched what my pc at 
work had) and that made no difference.  I then changed the location setting 
back to the original  (c:\msoffice\winword) and copied the thesaurus and dll 
files to there but that made no difference either.  I also tried copying the 
thesaurus and dll files from my pc at work on which the thesaurus works fine 
onto my pc at home, but the thesaurus still refused to work.
Using my pc at work I then found that I could change Tools; Options; File 
Locations; Dictionaries to any old directory at all and the spell checker and 
the thesaurus still worked fine.  My assumption now is that this 
specification for File Location must be for supplementary dictionaries, not 
the default ones.  I think Word must try to find the default ones using the 
entries in winword6.ini (or win.ini if winword6.ini doesn't exist - the 
install seems to create winword6.ini and also copy the entries into win.ini). 
Using Office Setup I then tried removing and reinstalling the thesaurus and 
that didn't fix it.  Next I tried removing and reinstalling Word - same 
result.  I then tried a full remove and reinstall of the whole Office suite.  
In trying to be cautious I renamed the original directories and .exes with 
.bu extensions first, then did the remove.  The aim of that was to still 
leave me the original programs if something went wrong, but let the remove 
clean up all the .ini etc. entries it could. However, as I found when I tried 
to then run the various Office products, Windows had been clever (almost) and 
had faithfully updated the references in the .ini files to .bu as well.  It 
then got into a mess with the remove/reinstall so that I ended up with a 
mish-mash of .bu and 'proper' references and various things in the Office 
suite wouldn't work.
Time to bite the bullet!  I deleted all Office related files and directories 
(.bu's included) and winword6.ini, then emptied the recycle bin to make that 
technically the computer should not find anything of them.  I also edited out 
all Office references from win.ini and did a total reinstall of Office from 
scratch. Guess what - I still have the same problem!  The thesaurus doesn't 
work properly, but everything else in the Office suite works fine.  All the 
help, cbt's, clip-art etc. in Word / Excel / Powerpoint work perfectly. 
For the sake of my sanity a solution to this problem would be gratefully 
accepted.  I figure it will turn out to be something simple but I want to 
know what!
Thanks,
Gary
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