When Xoom Word Pro 1.0 became available as part of Xoom Home Office Suite 97, there was excitement because it appeared that there was finally a Win9x Word Processor on the market. Excitement quickly died out when it was discovered that the program was a Win3x program and was buggy. John Logreco considered it to be a downgrade. I described it Xoom Word[Star] Pro[fessional] 1.0 [for Windows 2.0-]. I described it this way because the code was WSWin 2, but changes had been made, some of which were detrimental to its performance.

[1] XMWin's file open/close was modified for Word95 (aka WinWord6) file open/close.  Since WinWord6/7 is the "default" word processor environment for Win95, this is a significant modification.

This was accomplished by using the Softek file conversion capability to replace the WSWin's Mastersoft Word for Word (w4w*.dlls) autorecognition system.

This has the advantage of opening a WinWord6 file into XMWin using the default style sheets (WSWin creates import Styles). The disadvantage is that the Mastersoft autorecognition can read a greater number of formats.

[2] XMWin uses a later version of the Inso (the CorrectSpell division spun off from Houghton) CorrectSpell technology. For ease of distinction I refer to them as CorrectSpell1 (CS1) and CorrectSpell2 (CS2) (this follows the Lotus naming convention for the same dictionaries--Lotus1 for AmiPro and Lotus2 for Lotus WordPro). WSWin2 uses CS1 and XMWin uses CS2.

The default installation of CS2 in XMWin has a performance degradation. Whoever modified XMWin for Xoom failed to realize that the change from CS1 to CS2 was that hyphenation was now included in the dictionary files (before a separate hyphenation file was needed). XMWin includes hyphenation files which load as well as the dictionary. The effect of loading the second hyphenation capability was to degrade performance.

To fix this bug, move all the H*.DAT files to a backup folder. I suggest moving rather than deleting since the presence of the hyphenation files may be necessary for creating Personal dictionaries.

Because XMWin comes with more dictionaries than WSWin, with the above modification, one might want to install CS2 for WSWin.

[3] While XMWin replaced the Mastersoft File Open with Softek's, the Master File Import and Export was retained, although w4w*.dlls, were not included and they are not listed in a menu.

If one has copies of the Win3x w4w*.dlls, install the w4w file import/export w4w*.dlls in the XMWin directory. Rename XMWFLT.INF and XMWFLT.INI (in the Windows folder/directory) to XMWFLT.ORG. Download my WSWFLT.INF to the XMWin folder and rename it to XMWFLT.INF. Run XMWin to automatically create a new XMWFLT.INI. Now the Mastersoft file import and export will work using the ^KR and ^KW (WS key mapping) commands. One can even use macros assigned to the file menu (Import.XMC and Export.XMC).

[4] XMWin has modified the menus strangely assigning T to both Tables and Tools. To correct the double T (Table and Tools) in the XMWin menu, use a hex editor beginning at 2952A6 in XMWIN.DLL to change "&Table" to "Ta&ble".