Question: We are currently using Office 2002 on Windows XP but will be moving our users to Windows 7 in the next few months. Part of our business is writing research documents so there is heavy use of Word (including an in-house bespoke templating add-in).

The Windows 7 test user group have found that Word 2002 documents which contain tables/graphics can sometimes (but not always) display an annoying 'flicker' (especially if there are any drawing objects such as call-outs layered on top). This can be temporarily fixed by adjusting the zoom level in Word, but scrolling through the document will often cause the flicker to return.

The intention is to upgrade Office once all users have migrated to Windows 7 but realistically this may not be for 9-12 months; whilst that would possibly remove the problem, the time scale is too far in the future for users to accept at present.

Has anyone else come across a similar problem with Word 2002 on Windows 7 and/or found a solution to it?

Answer: 
I have seen a similar issue. We solved this by running Word in Compatibility mode, as also suggested by Randolph Potter in the comments above. What worked for us was to choose "Windows XP Service Pack 3".

Here is an article from How To Geek on changing Compatibility mode: <http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/10436/using-program-compatibility-mode-in-windows-7/>
From skimming the web it seems there's a fair number of people out there using Office 2002 with minimal problems on Windows 7 (most issues seem related to Outlook). I think it's going to be fairly natural of Microsoft to mark the compatibility status of such an old version of Office with the latest Windows as ambiguous; they have newer versions available.

Someone had [a similar flickering problem with Word 2002](https://www.sevenforums.com/microsoft-office/106239-flickering-display-word-2002-a.html) and posted a solution that worked for them:

> 
> In essence the document was created by
>  copy/pastes. The problem was that some
>  of the data overlapped the right
>  margins of the table/document and Word
>  did not know how to format it and
>  became locked. I solved it by copy
>  pasting a bit of the text at the time
>  to ensure it fit within the prescribed
>  table cells.
> 
> 
>