Weird Errors...

[Tech]

Sorry for x-posting but this is quite urgent and very annoying.
We have a small office network setup, with a central NT4 file server with
scheduled backups to various devices at the end of each day.
We have windows 98, windows me, windows xp home and windows xp pro users.
The following errors affect only the windows xp pro users, and seems to be
really random. I've not noticed any pattern as to why this happens so far.

All the users use word 97 as we have found it the most efficient and
feature-full product for our business.

Basically the following errors happen when a user (win xp pro) (one user in
particular gets these all the time) opens a word document from one of the
shared folders when an instance of word is not already open...
---
The document or path is not valid.
Try one or more of the following:
* Check the path to make sure it was typed correctly.
* On the file menu, click open. Search for the file using this dialog box.
(\\FILES\SHARED)
---
then when you click ok, the next error comes up...
The document or path is not valid.
Try one or more of the following:
* Check the path to make sure it was typed correctly.
* On the file menu, click open. Search for the file using this dialog box.
(FILES\D-W-C\word doc.doc)
---
then you click OK and the document opens fine.

The interesting bit is the path.
The path to the file would be \\FILES\SHARED FILES\D-W-C\word doc.doc, but
word seems to be throwing up the error when it encounters the space between
the bit saying SHARED FILES.

Just wondered if anyone else has encountered similar errors and knows how to
solve them.

Thanks

PS: a quick reply would be greatly appreciated.

Ben