Have you followed the suggestion to always have Word ask before saving
changes to normal.dot? It is the best way of checking on what is being added
and when. In my experience, normal.dot does _not_ grow without saving
changes but since it is the default container for multiple items including
AutoText, styles and macros, it takes conscious effort for anyone using
these features to keep from having it grow. I keep the bulk of these changes
in other files but still have what I consider to be a large normal.dot of
about 1.4 Mb. I suspect that this is because I keep scraps of vba code in
normal.dot to use as a resource for working in other projects.
--
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!
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"PA" wrote in message
...
Actually, 189kb is rather large when you consider that a new one is 29KB
and
more important, that it grows by itself without saving changes. We use
Office 2002 with Win2K
It is a daily growth of the file that is of interest to us.

What would cause it to grow - we have run virus, adware, spyware, etc
scans
to eliminate any outside influences. Option settings seem normal.
Can anyone take a guess as to why the file seems to have a life of its
own,
growth wise.

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

Normal.dot is a user file and 189kb is a particularly small one at that.
I
don't see why you are concerning yourself with this. However a better
plan
would be to ensure that tools options save prompt to save
normal.dot
is checked and then only required additions will be saved to it.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org


PA wrote:
What are the potential problem areas that one should look at to
trouble shoot a constantly growing Normal template file, Normal.dot
I have a user whose file has grown from 45KB to 189KB in three days,
without having added any customizations to Word. Word has been used
for the basics of word processing only.
Any guidance would be appreciated.
Paul