I have found that many web sites are incorrectly set up to
Download/View Microsoft Word documents. I am hoping that this message will be
widely distributed to reduce occurrences of this problem.

It is necessary to instruct a webserver that Word files are not plain text, 
otherwise, they get downloaded/viewed as plain text and cannot be used by Word.
This messes up some pointers within Word that appear to get cleared,
at least with Win 95, only by rebooting. I have reported this to Microsoft.

How one does this depends on whether you have an NCSA or a CERN based server. 
If the web server does not have an appropriate type defined for Word, 
i.e., for .doc and .dot files, then you will need to do something in your 
local web server directories.

In my case, the server is NCSA based so all I had to do was:

1. Add a .htaccess file to the directory in which my index.html file lives. I 
only needed to include the following line.

AddType application/msword .doc

This causes the webserver to treat the .doc files as binary.
A similar line is needed for .dot files.

2. I had the Word files in my ftp directories. Apparently, the .htaccess file 
applies only to the directories on the web server, so I simply added links to 
the Word files from the web server directory to the ftp server directory and 
now reference the Word files as if they were local files on the web server, 
rather than via ftp.

3. The .htaccess file must be readable by everyone, i.e., use chmod a=+r.