[mark4man]

I copied text from an internet document; & pasted it into a new Word document for editing. Word proceeded to die. It will not open at all. I get the splashscreen logo (Word 2000), but the hourglass just hovers; & the program will not open. If I hit Ctrl>Alt>Delete twice, I recieve a message that states that the system is dangerously low in resources. If I try to open Word from another program, I get a WinWord error. I Repaired the program from the setup CD; & it does not work. I uninstalled & reinstalled; & it does not work. Anybody got any ideas?

MF

[Max19]

Did you try just rebooting?

[RandyG]

Do a search on your system for normal.dot, and when found, rename it to normal.old.

try opening Windows now.

[mark4man]

Randy,

Worked like a charm! You'll be happy to know that Dell (or Microsoft, for that matter) couldn't figure it out. Thanks very much.

mw4man

[Sellina]

Originally posted by RandyG
Do a search on your system for normal.dot, and when found, rename it to normal.old.

try opening Windows now.

After spending 2 days searching diff forums for the above problem i did as you suggested randy and it worked thanks thanks thanks and mwwwwwwwwwaaaaaahhhhhh to u
U are def top of my christmas card list lol

Sellina

[RandyG]

Thanx for the kind words, but thanx go to this site, and Dreamboat, because she was the one that taught me that one!

[Anne Troy]

...for the kind words, Randy!

And just to let you all know some things about normal.dot:

Normal.dot is the global template that Word uses. Everytime you open Word, you actually get a blank document that is a copy of the normal.dot template.

When Word is launched, it looks for the normal.dot file. When it doesn't find one, it creates a brand new one. Because Word only creates a brand new one when it doesn't find one, reinstalling Word does not help--the normal.dot file is never installed on a fresh install and it's not installed on a reinstall.

Renaming normal.dot resolves many issues and is the first step to troubleshooting an issue in Word that is otherwise unknown. I usually rename it to abnormal.dot so that when a user is looking for their old normal.dot to copy from, they'll find it by looking for *.dot files.

Normal.dot is also the file in which macro viruses are stored when they're contracted. To get rid of macro viruses in Word, all you need do is rename the normal.dot file. You can delete it/them if you prefer, but I choose to tell people to rename it. That way, if they lose special toolbars, we can still get them from the "abnormal.dot" file and import them into the new normal.dot using the organizer.