Changes Have been made that affect the Global Template, Normal.dot

[ReadyFreddy]

I am running Office XP 2002 under Windows XP Pro. This part of the
system has been vertually unchanged for over a year except for all the
updates to Windows and Office (SP3 included). All of a sudden, when I
close Word or Outlook (I use Word for my Outlook editor) I get the
following message: "Changes have been made that affect the Global
Template, Normal.dot. Do you want to save these changes".

At this point it does not matter whether I click Yes or No, Word tries
to close and eventially I get the Po-Up screen that says: "Microsoft
Word has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for
the inconvienence. The information you are working on might be lost.
Microsoft can try to recover it for you." I then get the option to
recover my work and restart Word. Aso the option to send this info to
Microsoft is on the same screen.

I have taken the following steps to try and fix the problem. First I
un-installed Word and re-installed it. Tha t had no effect so i
un-installed all of Office and re-installed it. Still has aame
problem. I looked in the knowledge base and tried a couple everything
I could find but I still have this same problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

 

[Airman 366]

Try deleting all copies of Normal.dot on your hard drives. Word will
generate a new one.

 

[ReadyFreddy]

Thanks for the input, as it turned out, an add-in for the Global
Template was causing the problem.I deleted it and everything now works
like it used to.

 

[Howard Kaikow]

Most often, an improperly written 3rd party add-in/macro is causing a change
to the Normal template.
In other cases, there are simple operations that you may be performing via
the GUI that cause Word to dirty the template.

Little/nothing you can do about those without tracking down the cause.

However, sometimes templates get "dirtied" by Word itself.
Indeed, my Normal.dot is read-only and every year or so, Word seems to want
to dirty the template.

Also, see http://www.standards.com/OhMyWord/RebuildingTemplates.htm..