I suspect that I didn't state the problem I was having clearly enough but they're trying to save to a local drive: desktop, subfolder, flashdrive, none of these will give any message from Word except the cryptic one of the drive being full. The account they are using is a standard account, not an administrative one; but originally I was trying to restrict them from running certain things using "Parental Controls" and they've mostly figured out how to get around that so I turned it off! I've checked the rights and repaired them just in case.
My solution, as stated, was to try to get them entirely out of the classic environment and software. I've already gotten them into Indesign CS instead of the old Pagemaker and I'm trying to get them to use Abiword.
I'm going to experiment with this at home or there over the summer and see if I can get to the bottom of this!