Hi All,

I'm running into an issue which is affecting my ability to automate Word. It's only affecting a few of my customers - it seems only those running Word XP on Windows XP.

Here are the symptons:
1) When trying to automate, I get the following error message when adding a document to a Word instance: "The document 'Normal.dot' caused a serious error the last time it was opened. You may continue opening it or perform data recovery by clicking 'Recover Data'...."
2) When I open Word on an affected machine through the Start Menu, I get the following message: "Normal.dot was being edited by another Word session."
3) When I close out of Word after starting it up an affected machine, I get the following: "Changes have been made that affect the global template, Normal.dot. Do you want to save these changes?"
4) In the Microsoft Templates folder, which stores Normal.dot, after closing out of Word, it leaves a file named "~normal.dat", even if I delete it before opening Word.

I checked the task manager, and there are no hidden instances of Word running.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks,

David