I am running Office XP on Windows XP. Both are patched and up-to-date. Word gives me a runtime error on starting. When I delete all occurrances of normal.dot, word starts fine. However, the next time I try to start word, normal.dot is corrupted again. I usually find three occurances of it. The main file, a faded icon copy, and a shortcut.

Any ideas.

Could be that the registry for Word has been corrupted.

Open regedit, go to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Word

Delete everything under there. This will reset all Word settings to their defaults.

Thanks Nodsu! I just cleaned out the registry key and all seems to be running well. When I opened Word, it did a quick install without the CD, and then opened right up.

I opened and closed word several times, and it worked, but the first time I opened Outlook, normal.dot was corrupt again. Should I clear the regsitry entries for outlook too?

Yes. You should write down or export your account settings first.

While you are at it, you can clean up all the other Office apps too. If two are alredy broken, then chances are that all of them are bad.

You should also run a thorough virus check.. Try the free online scan at http://www.trendmicro.com

Thank you for the help; I am at least more educated now. It seems that no matter what I do, the problem keeps coming back. Since I have already spent way to many hours on it, nothing left to do but reinstall windows. I am behind in that annual ritual anyway!?!

Thanks again.

Live, Love, Laugh! Evan

Whoa, um... Try uninstalling and reinstalling office itself before you format!

Take a look at some of these KB files ;
http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?catalog=LCID=1033&spid=global&query=normal.dot&adv=

Normal.dot is template file that can be changed by scripts that are run in all Office programs, it is not ordinarilly a problem. I get some messages from it as I use some scripts for some of my Office stuff.