[moty]

Perhaps, however, this automation has been working fine for about two years. More, the automation is done by a shared Access application, and the problem is in a single workstation in which Word saves the template upon every exit. The problem may be solved as you suggested (this involves making changes in a big Access application), but definitely, the source of the problem is inside Word. Any ideas?

[Anne Troy]

Check the setting under Tools-Options, Save tab.
See what everyone's else's settings are for saving normal.dot

[moty]

You can only decide if you want to be notified about saving the Normal template. You cannot avoid saving it from the Options.

[moty]

I finally found the reason for the problem.
I opened the Normal.dot file with Notepad. Just by looking at it, I found there the words "Bluetooth" and "Palm T5". A Bluetooth adapter was the last thing I added to my PC and Palm T5 is the name ID I gave my PDA. How all that ended inside Normal.dot I have no clue. Perhaps Billionton.com can answer that.
I uninstalled the Bluetooth device, deleted the corrupted Normal.dot and all is OK now.

Thank you Dreamboat for your help. I hope this can help someone else too.

[ttam007]

Since Normal.dot can be corrupted so easily and it seems like every forum tells users to delete it where there is a problem, I'm sure there are many annoyed users that just lost a whole host of Word settings, macros, styles, and other customizations.

There is a way to avoid all this. Create a document template. Call it MyStuff.dot (notice the "T" at the end) or whatever you feel like as long as the Save As field says "Document Template (.dot)". Word will default to saving this in the same folder as Normal.dot, which is where you want it to be.

Any time you create or modify a style, tool bar, auto-text, or macro, make sure you save it to MyStuff.dot instead of Normal.dot. Usually there is a drop-down list at the bottom to select where the item will be saved. If not, then you can use the Organizer to move the items from Normald.dot to MyStuff.dot (from within Word, press Alt-F8, and then click Organizer button).