Win98 start up problem

[Alfie]

A friend's computer crashed and when she restarted,Windows loaded,but an error window appeared stating explorer has caused a fault in... and will be shutdown.
Does the same thing in safemode,attempted to reinstall Win98,same thing happened.
She has files on the computer,she wishes to save,so format and reinstall are out for now.
The files are stored in Word,is there a way to extract them in dos and how would one do it?
Is it feasible to reinstall Win98 and how would I do it?
There's another hard drive in the system,is it feasible to copy files from C: to D: and if I did that could the Word files be accessed and if so how?
If I could copy all files from C: to D:,could I then format C: reinstall Win98 and be able to access the files on D:?
If I did that,would it boot okay with copied OS on D: and new copy on C:?

[Alfie]

I'm familiar with the command prompt,but forget the dos commands for moving files,etc.,so that's my main query,if you could break it down,nice and simple,it would be appreciated.
Someone suggested it might be faulty memory,so I'll test that,but in the meanwhile wanted to be able to move her files to a safe place.
The files are in Word,how would I move those files,as Word is accessed while in Windows,can you get to them in Dos?

[The PIT]

If you don't feel like doing a clean install of windoze do it this way.
Boot from floppy with the cd drivers loaded and copy the cab files to the harddrive unless they're already there.
Delete the win.com and then run setup.exe from the location where the cab files are.
Go out and make yourself a drink and hopefully windoze will come backup with you're old proggies installed.
Now the problems you're going to get are with internet explorer and outlook express as these will be now mixed old and new versions so you'll need to upgrade these with a later version.
If you've got the latest version already installed you may have a problem using the repair option should help on this.
If outlook express is being used as a mailer it's likely that her emails will go west as well.
Since you're only deleting win.com you shouldn't lose any files.
It's also worth trying restoring the registry from an earlier version by using scanreg /restore from the C prompt.

[thop]

google for DOS instructions, should have all commands in it. other possibility, more elegant, make a bootdisk with old norton commander on it.
even more elegant: dowload knoppix. that's a linux distribution thats boots entirely off the CD and will mount your FAT16/32 drives so you can move/rename/etc. the files just like in windows (with a GUI). it will mount the drives as read-only in default mode though. if you got a burner in that box you could even burn them to cd with knoppix.