Both of these problems are usually caused by the Office Plug-in in Norton
AntiVirus, which you can disable without compromising your virus protection
provided you leave Auto-Protect enabled.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"GS1010" wrote in message
...
When attempting to open Word documents, message is that file is
unavailable
even thought it is displayed in my file list. Also, I think that this
might
have something to do with the problem: when I save a file, the message I
get
states that the file "normal already exists. Do you want to change it?"
or
something to that effect.

I have some experience with Word, but have never encountered this before.

Thanks.