I just came across the following, which may relate to your issue, even though you've created a custom template. This issue appears to be making changes to the template, however, not simply opening a document.



If Word is being used in a networked environment, the Normal.dot file could be common to all users on the network. If this is the case, then changes cannot be saved to Normal.dot when other people are accessing it. For instance, if User 1 and User 2are using Word, both are actually accessing the same Normal.dot file. When User 1 exits the program, his changes cannot be written to Normal.dot until User 2also exits the program.

This is just a hunch, but it seemed to work when I tested it on my machine.

Try to mark the template file as read-only.
1) Right-click on the file (in Windows explorer)
2) Choose Properties
3) Check the Read-Only box.
4) Close the properties box
5) Test it out.

The reason I think this will work is that a template file is opened as read/write once you open on of the files created from that template. My guess is that this is done so that if you modify one of the template features (style, header, footer, etc) then you can save the changes back to the template at the same time.

When you want to modify the template, which is probably fairly rare, just mark the template writable for the short period of time that it is actually begin modified.

Good luck
Paul

Paul,
That actually works.
Thank you so much for the tip.
It would have been nice to find out exactly how Microsoft intended this to work in a business environment when they designed it but that's something we probably will never find out.

/Henrik