Oops ... looks like I got that setting backwards, for the check box in Word Options. There may not be a way to force Word to automatically reject changes to the Normal template during an exit.


An Auto macro, in and of itself, would not change the Normal template unless it was programmed to do so. If that was the case, everybody in the firm would be having the same problem. I am assuming you are the only one.

There are several things you can do while editing a document that could be changing the Normal template, such as: creating auto-text entries, creating or modifying styles, adding or changing keyboard shortcuts, creating or editing macros, changing certain Word Options, and probably other things as well. If you were doing any of those things, you might not be able to save/replace your Normal (if it is read-only), but you should not get that first error message either.

There are other things that can go wrong and cause the first error message you are getting to be generated. Your registry could be corrupted; you could have an orphaned winword.exe process running from when you attempted to close a Word session earlier and it didn’t close properly; you could have opened a Word attachment to an Outlook email. (I don’t know how common the Outlook attachment problem is but I saw it mentioned as a possibility and a workaround was suggested, to save attachments rather then opening them from Outlook, then open them in Word.)

It looks like this is going to be a difficult problem to solve.