...the file vanishes

...I hope someone can shed some light on an odd
problem. Simply, I was typing away in Word 2002 when the computer
made
a small noise and - my file disappeared. Word stayed open but the doc
was gone.
This happened on a new Acer Aspire N270 Netbook with a 1gb Atom
processor and 160gb HD. The Word isn't the one it came with on trial
but one I installed.
At the time the battery wasn't installed. I'm told that if you
run
it with the adapter and house current while the battery is fully
charged, the life of the Li-on battery is reduced. However, I don't
think this was a power fluctuation because nothing flickered or
wavered etc.
I reopened the original doc. It was still there. Then I I went
looking for a temp version of the file and fooled with the 'recover
file' line in the document-type space and eventually found something
with the file name preceeded with a squiggle. When I opened it, I got
my own name repeated three times.
Should I not have reopened the original before hunting up the
temp?
The autosave was on and set for ten minutes. I wasn't sure if it
had
saved anything on the original doc or not. I did loose work, tho.
When I was first loading stuff into this machine a month ago, I
stupidly withdrew a USB key without closing it. At that time I also
had a word file open, and on that occasion my entire 'my documents'
simply disappeared, tho all my programs remained and seemed fine. Did
I do some damage at that time that might be related?
Any idea what happened? is my hard drive acting up? I don't see
this happening to others when I search but my worry is that this
might
happen again. And yes I am doing a LOT of saving... thanks for
reading
this far, folks, and fire away - dax