Word just kicked me out after I saved 3 times without it shutting down on me and now I've got what I'm assuming to be the blue screen of death. I found something with my AdAware that told me I had Trojan something or another yesterday, but I took it off.

First off, do I unplug my computer to make the screen go away or does that make things worse?

You should note the error message. The Windows XP B.S.O.D. is much more helpful than the Win9x. (Note, I didn't say good.)

Terminating the message early will prevent windows from being able to analyse it's state from just before the crash. (it takes all that time to write a dump file containing the system just before crash.) This file can provide some useful information, but not always. Using the reset button would be ok, simply pulling the plug from the wall is very hard on the entire computer. If you don't want to see the message, you can set your computer to automatically restart.
**Right click My Computer, select "Properties" Click the "Advanced" tab, in the 'Startup and Recovery' section click the "Settings" button. Now check the "Automatically restart" box under the System Failure section. Click OK on the open dialogs, being sure to accept any changes. Restart the computer to apply the changes.

If you are getting the same error each time please post it, it will narrow (somewhat) the list of possible problems.

Things to try anyway:

If AdAware really spoted Trojan, be sure to do a complete scan of your computer with an up-dated virus scanner. Remove any problems found.

Restart the computer

Install, update, and run, Spybot Search and Destroy. It can find problems that AdAware misses. Fix any issues found.

Restart the computer

Once those comes out clean, run the repair process on your install of Word:
**Start -> Control Pannel -> Add or Remove Programs -> scroll down to "Microsoft Office ...." and click on it. Click the "Change" button. A dialog will open shortly asking you what to do next. Select the "Repair Office" radio button and click "Next." I would start with the "Detect and Repair errors in my Office Installation" then click "Install." Note that you will need your original install media.

There is also a small simple program called 'Process Explorer' that I have used in the past to find virii on computers. It is just a replacement for the taskmanager, but it has a lot of little extra details, most notably child processes, threads, handles, dlls used, etc. It will also show some of the processes that can be hidden from the default taskmanager.

After a BSoD, where it spits out a memory dump file. Does anyone know where this is located? I searched for *.dmp, but nothing turned up.

Thx.

Looks like I'm all better. Scanned and quarantined some more stuff, took it to IT just in case, and found out I had to delete Firefox and go back to IE.

Thanks for your help!

NOOOOOOO! not firefox! what was their reasoning for that?

btw - why the new avatar?

Opera > FireFox > IE.

While it is possible to define a location, it defaults to the system root, typically C, the file is MEMORY.DMP

I'm not sure if windows hangs on to the file for long. If you do a complete memory dump and have a large amount of ram it could be pretty large.

Well, when I couldn't even access Minermail without using IE tab, they figured it was time to dump Firefox.

Maybe it might be fitting to have a treefrog in my avatar? Just need to find a cute enough picture that will fit.