For those interested, I found an obscure related problem, which is probably the cause of my problem. At the very least, it has provided me with a strategy around the issue.

MSDN KB article 322192 talks about a problem when importing PowerPoint slides in Word 2002. The normal.dot gets corrupted, and the cause (according to MS anyways) is Norton Antivirus. Since I'm importing HTML into Word, I thought the problem may be related.

Turns out that disabling Norton Antivirus does not resolve the problem (though I still need to test with shutting down my machine), as the article would suggest, but renaming the global template does.

I can't ask my cusomters to shut off Norton, so now my strategy is going to be:
1) Determine if Norton AV is running on the given machine (which I can do using Windows API functions). If it's not running, no problem. If it is, continue.
2) Where is Normal.Dot stored on given machine (not sure about this one)
3) Can I get exclusive access to it to temporarily rename it (use Try/Catch/Finally)
4) Run my automation process
5) Delete the newly created Normal.dot
6) Rename the previous normal.dot back to normal.dot

Any thoughts about this?

Thanks,

David


>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