Word 2003 slowing down: normal.dot grows 42 kB per Word-stop

[Peter J. Veger]

Starting and stopping Word 2003 takes longer and longer.
Normal.dot has grown to several MB.
When starting with a "fresh" normal.dot (91 kB) it became obvious that
normal.dot grows with 42 kB each time Word is stopped: 91 --> 139 -->
181 --> 223 --> etc.

- when starting a blank page it grows with 9 kB, but when this blank page is
removed, its size is reduced again.
- removing the one Startup dot-file prsent had no effect.
- there are no global templates and add-ins

I still have two clusters of special items:
- from Adobe Acrobat I have two menu items Adobe PDF and Adobe Comments and
a toolbar PDFMaker 7.0
- from ScanSoft a menu item PDF Create! and a toolbar ScanSoft PDF
I do not know how to disable these for testing (or how to remove them).

How can I stop the cancer in normal.dot?

 

[Graham Mayor]

Acrobat 7 is a notorious troublemaker - see the last part of
http://www.gmayor.com/lose_that_adobe_acrobat_toolbar.htm

You hardly need two PDF creating tools on the Word toolbar. I would suggest
you to disable the add-in for the ScanSoft tool (if it is not listed in
tools > templates and add-ins as a dot file - widen the box to read the
path - you would probably disable it from the ScanSoft application options)
and fix the Acrobat one.

Normal.dot shouldn't change at all if you set tools > options > save >
prompt to save normal.dot and reply no when quitting. Only agree to changes
that you want to save.

Remove all the dross Word leaves behind when misbehaving. -
http://www.gmayor.com/what_to_do_when_word_crashes.htm then rename
normal.dot to oldnormal.dot. Start Word then use the organizer to transfer
any personalisations you want to retain from old to new, then when Word
prompts you to save normal.dot for the first time on closing thereafter,
agree to it. Then only save those changes you are sure you want to keep.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Peter J. Veger]

Origin of problem found: it is the MS Word addin "redaction.Connect"
I have set its HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins\redaction.Connect
LoadBehavior value in the registry to 0.
(I have Acrobat 7.0.5 with no problems --- I use it daily --- and, indeed, I
do not need two PDF-creating tools.)

Thanks for pointing in the direction of the problem.
But now MS has something to do: to repair its Redaction add-in.