hi pnjcarter,

As a rule, mailmerge main documents shouldn't be stored as templates, since running the merge doesn't impact the underlying document. Besides, you probably don't want or need a new mailmerge main document being created every time you want to merge. If you just use the mailmerge main document as a mailmerge main document, rather than using a template, that may be sufficient to resolve your problems.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]