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.

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://word.mvps.org/FAQs/ which is awesome!
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from my ignorance and your wisdom.


"S2" wrote in message
...
Greetings all -
I am running Word 2k3 (SP2). I renamed normal.dot and started Word so
that
it would create a new normal.dot. However, every time I close Word, it
thinks I have made changes to Normal.dot. I can literally open Word and
close it without typing a thing and I'm prompted (I set this option
deliberately) for whether or not I want to save changes to normal.dot.
Can
someone tell me what's changing that template?

Best, S2