Yes, I was running the macro "in" Normal.dotm and it is a text editing macro that is intended to insert text into the document ... so I needed to do what I did. I just needed to "clean" the document after I had what I needed. Workaround not as good as how base product is supposed to function.

What I really needed was to be able to save macros in Normal.dotm while I am editing some target document.

Solution: I "disabled" all "Action" type Add-Ins, they seemed to be innocuous, and there after recording macros in Normal.dotm worked !

Thanks for your help.