In the never-ending struggle of man vs. Microsoft, we can report one victory and one tie this week.

We’re not talking about the ongoing federal case of U.S. vs. Microsoft, where the Justice Department is prosecuting the software giant for the crime of selling products that consumers want at low prices. (That’s our take on the antitrust case, although we know that a few readers have a somewhat different view). Rather, we’re referring to the constant battle by everyday PC users to make Microsoft products work the way we want them to.

Our (small) victory involves Microsoft’s word-processing program, which is sold in various forms under various names (Microsoft Works, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office, etc.).

Most of the time, we prefer using the competing product from Lotus, Word Pro (also sold as part of Lotus Smart Suite). We find it easier to design fancy documents with the Lotus program. But Microsoft Word is a good product and also happens to be our company’s corporate word-processing choice, so we write with it now and then.

Our problem has been that in the original set-up, Word used a standard typeface (Times New Roman in the 8-point size) that is hard to see particularly on a laptop computer. Actually, our kids don’t have any trouble seeing this typeface, but when you reach our venerable age, it gets hard to see anything smaller than a hippopotamus. So we generally change the typeface, to 12-point or 14-point size, whenever we start typing in Word.

It’s a fundamental truth of computers that you should be able to automate changes like that. We always knew that there had to be a way to tell Word to pop up the larger typeface automatically, whenever we loaded the program. After some searching, we even found directions for doing so in Microsoft’s notoriously vague online Help. But the Help screen set forth a complex seven-step procedure that never worked when we tried it. There had to be an easier way.

The other day we were trying to change the color of the text of a document in Microsoft Word. We clicked on the “Format” command on the menu bar, then on “Font.” The familiar box came up that lets you choose font, font size, color, etc. And over on the right side of this box, we saw a button marked “Default.” Curious as to what that might mean, we clicked the box and discovered that this would change the “default,” or standard, typeface to the one we had chosen.

Eureka! Now the program automatically comes up using Times New Roman in the 14-point size, and we can actually read the words on the laptop screen. (Users with more serious visual problems could use the same technique to make that “default” typeface much bigger say, 18- or 20-point type). We’ll score this as a victory.

Sadly, we have had less luck figuring out a solution to our problem with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 4.0. For some weird reason, the browser program can no longer find any of our “Favorites” that is, the Internet addresses we go to time after time. So we have to type in some complex address every time we want to see a familiar Web page.

When we mentioned that problem in this column a while back, many thoughtful readers offered advice. The consensus solution was that we had to copy the contents of the “Favorites” directory to a floppy disk, uninstall Explorer, then re-install Explorer and copy the “Favorites” directory back to the hard disk. This no doubt would have worked, but seemed unnecessarily complicated.

A kind and patient software engineer from Microsoft then took on the challenge. In a blizzard of e-mails, he offered numerous suggestions for isolating the problem and fixing it. Pursuing these ideas took us to corners of the hard disk we’d never seen before, and brought home how amazingly complicated the organizational structure of Windows has become. But none of the suggestions solved the problem. Our browser remained Favorites-free.

Finally, we went to the Microsoft Web site (microsoft.com) and downloaded the preview edition of the new version 5.0 of Internet Explorer. This program cleverly found our existing Favorites directory the one that mysteriously stopped working with version 4.0 and has given us no trouble (so far). So our browser problem may be solved. We wouldn’t quite call this a “victory,” but at least Microsoft didn’t leave us totally defeated.

So we’ve scored one victory and one tie vis-a-vis Microsoft. Which is a much better record than the U.S. government will have when its stupid antitrust case finally comes to an end.

T.R. Reid is London bureau chief of the Washington Post. Brit Hume is managing editor of Fox News in Washington. You can reach them in care of the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St., Washington D.C. 20071-9200, or you can e-mail T.R. Reid at [email protected] and Brit Hume at [email protected].