Charles,
FYI, I'm Six Sigma Green belt certified and Black Belt Trained and I'm also
an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer. My mind set is to eliminate the root
cause as opposed to putting in a band aid.
Barb
"Charles Kenyon" wrote in
message ...
You get the message because changes have been made. You do not want the
message (smoke alarm) to go away, you want the changes (smoke or fire) to
go
away.

It is essential that you have a good virus detection/elimination program
on
your computer if you are connected to the Internet. (but see the third
paragraph about Norton AV)

The message "Changes have been made that affect the global template -
normal. Do you wish to save those changes?" is an important warning. It
suppplements your virus detector and handles other potential problems. Its
display means that changes have been made, whether you intended to make
changes or not. You can also get it when your template has been altered by
a
poorly written Add-In program or by a virus.

An isolated message usually means you really did make a change. Examples
include storing an AutoText entry, a macro, or changing a style or toolbar
or default font.

The reason for the message being shown repeatedly is almost always a
poorly
written Add-In. The Norton AV Office Plug-In seems to be the most frequent
offender recently, but that can change as some other poorly written
program
comes on the market.

Other offenders include the MS Works Suite Add-In, EZ-Photo, Scansoft, and
Adobe Acrobat. These all install Add-Ins that mess with your normal.dot
when
they shouldn't do so and don't need to do so. Some of these are .dot
files,
others are installed. See URL:
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CheckIfAddinsInstalled.htm for
instructions on seeing what Add-Ins you have. (Having Add-Ins is not a bad
thing. I run Word with 15 Add-Ins, most of which I wrote myself.)

Start with the Add-Ins I've noted. If you have any of them, decide whether
they are worth the annoyance they are causing you. Probably they are not.
Disable any that are not worth the candle. Restart Word and see if your
problem is gone.

If not...

If you start Word using
Start = Run: Winword.exe /a
you'll end up with Word out of the box loading without your saved
normal.dot
file, with no macros and no Add-Ins. You may notice that it loads much
more
quickly than you are used to seing. When you close it, you won't get the
"normal.dot" prompt. Doing this may fix the problem, by itself, but
probably
will not. Generally, it is a diagnostic, not a fix.

So, what you need to do is disable all of your Add-Ins (don't delete
them).
Start by moving .dot files out of your Word Startup folder, one-by-one,
with
Word closed. Restart Word and see if that Add-In caused the problem. If
not,
put it back in and take the next one out. (You can put them in a
sub-folder
of your Startup folder.) If none of them are the problem, move to the .com
Add-Ins that have to be uninstalled.

If your offender is not on my list, please write back and let us know
which
one caused your problems.

Write to the company that put out the Add-In with a complaint, and
possibly
a bill for your time.

Hope this helps,
--

Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide

See also the MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word which is awesome!
--------- --------- --------- --------- --------- ---------
This message is posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies
and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn
from my ignorance and your wisdom.

"Barb Reinhardt" wrote in message
...
Yesterday, for the first time, I got the following message when closing
down word:

Changes have been made that affect the global template. Do you want to
save them?

First, I don't know what I would have changed in the global template in
the last 24 hours and secondly, how do I get this to go away? At this
point, I'm not saving any of these changes.