Phantom MS Word

Last night I downloaded several PowerPoint presentations from my computer professor's site to study for this morning's final exam, and every time I tried using ctrl+F to find stuff in one of them my computer would glitch out after a few minutes. Everything would freeze up (except WinAmp, which continued to play) and my laptop's screen flashed off and on. This happened three times. The first time I managed to get PP closed, the second time I had to turn off the computer and it corrupted the MS Word document I had open, and the third time I managed to close PP again and gave up. All was fine even after rebooting a few times during all that, and MS Word still worked normally.

However, this morning when I booted up Word XP seems to be almost gone. The shortcut is a blank symbol and nothing happens when I click on it, and Word is gone from my programs list in the Start menu. All of my Word documents work though, and I can create new documents from there.

My question is, what can I do to restore Word without reinstalling? I got Office XP free using a friend's account with a different university, so I don't have a disc. Also, could this problem potentially get worse if I shut down my computer again? I have a research paper due on Thursday, so I can't really afford to lose Word right now.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Couldn't you edit the properties of the bookmark to point to Word again? Just do a search on your hard drive for "winword.exe" (that's what mine is called), then you'll know where it is.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Huzzah, that worked! I'll go ahead and close this for now since the main problem seems to be resolved. If that shortcut corrupts too or the problem gets worse then I'll reopen it.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.